Help needed! After a long hospital stay, a six months old girl needs important life-saving apparatus, devices and medical food to safely recover at home.
The girl was born with a severe heart defect and due to many co-existing conditions, she requires respiratory support, a pulse oximeter, an aspirator, as well as additional instruments and medical food. All this together costs 6844€ and the sick girl’s family lacks the needed financials. This is why the help from the kind benefactors of the Children’s Fund (Lastefond) is needed!
Although the pulse oximeter and aspirator are both in the reimbursement list of the Estonian Health Services for usage in a hospital setting, the Paediatrics Clinic of the Tartu University Hospital is unable to give out these devices for home-usage. Due to the high need for aspiration, the little girl also requires substantially more instruments than the reimbursement list of the health care services has allocated for. Also, the family must pay 50% of the medical food cost.
The strategic lead of the Children’s Fund, Siiri Ottender-Paasma, finds it regretful that a family already in such devastating situation is left to worry about funding the life-saving apparatus for their daughter. “It was only at the beginning of this year when we were happy to see that the National Health Services started to fund the needed medical devices. However, it has now become apparent that the hospital does not have the devices to rent out to the family in need and the devices must be bought by the family itself. We hope that this problem will be resolved soon to prevent the doctors and the parents of sick children from having to deal with securing and funding for these devices.”