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Community Corner

6 Central Connecticut Rotary Clubs Join to Help Families of Sick Babies at UConn

FARMINGTON (May 5, 2014) – Six Central Connecticut Rotary Clubs are joining forces to raise enough money to help families bond with their infant children who are patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the University of Connecticut (UConn) Health Center in Farmington.

 

Specifically, the six clubs are launching a campaign called the NICU Webcam Project to purchase special web cameras for each of the 40 incubators in the UConn Health Center NICU and eventually to purchase cameras for the 32 incubators in the NICU at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CCMC) in Hartford. The idea is that parents, families and friends of the premature or ill infants can connect to the babies via the Internet even when the families can’t physically be at the hospital.

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“They’ll be able to get to know their babies and actually watch their development whether the families are at home, work, the other side of the country or even the other side of the world,” said Mecheal Hamilton, president-elect of the Rotary Club of Farmington.

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Hamilton and the president-elects of the other five Rotary Clubs – Avon-Canton, Hartford, Newington, West Hartford and Wethersfield – got the idea while attending a recent special training session for the presidents who will take the reigns of their clubs at the end of June. It was there that they heard a presentation by Roy Balfour of the Shrewsbury, Mass., Rotary Club about how the Central Massachusetts Rotary clubs joined forces to purchase web cameras for the NICU at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Memorial Health Center in Worcester, Mass.

 

The Massachusetts Rotarians successfully purchased enough web cameras for all 49 incubators at the UMass Memorial Health Center. Since then, the families of infant patients login to the web cameras an average of 3,000 times a month. And it isn’t just parents who have been able to view the babies; so have other members of their families like brothers and sisters who are in the military, serving aboard ships and places like Afghanistan.

 

“Rotary is an organization that is dedicated to public service locally, nationally and internationally,” said Hamilton. “We just feel that the NICU Webcam Project is a perfect fit for what we are all about. We’re helping our neighbors here in Connecticut who are going through some stressful times with children in the hospital.”

 

Because of security and cleanliness concerns, the cost to purchase and install each of the cameras will be $2,000. Hamilton estimates it will likely take two years to purchase all the web cameras, with each of the Rotary clubs purchasing individual cameras one-at-a-time.

 

The Rotarians will also be aided by the EvvGirl Foundation, which will work to secure corporate sponsors so that more cameras can be purchased more quickly. The EvvGirl Foundation of Agawam, Mass., is named in honor of Evan Bard, a Curry College student who was killed in a car crash a year ago. Her father, Todd Bard, said his daughter had a great passion for young children, making the foundation’s dedication to the project that much more special.

 

The other Rotary Club president-elects in addition to Hamilton are:

 

·       Salin Low of the Rotary Club of Avon-Canton;

 

·       Steve Vaughn of the Rotary Club of Hartford;

 

·       Ed Silverstein of the Rotary Club of Newington;

 

·       Cynthia Lang of the Rotary Club of West Hartford; and

 

·       Gina Herboldt of the Rotary Club of Wethersfield.

 

The six Central Connecticut clubs are part of Rotary International, a worldwide organization with 1.2 million members who work to help others through public service.

 


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