GAPPS and the Hansen Ventilator: Saving Babies Around the World

This video highlights Global Alliance to Prevent Prematurity and Stillbirth (GAPPS), an initiative of Seattle Children's. Prematurity and stillbirth affect families in developing countries as well as the developed world. The biology of pregnancy and childbirth remain poorly understood, so GAPPS is raising visibility and awareness, accelerating discovery, enabling better diagnostics and promoting research to identify causes and solutions. GAPPS was born to address these large global maternal and child health issues, mobilizing an international approach and resources to make every birth count.

The final three minutes of the video profiles how Seattle Children's CEO Dr. Tom Hansen, a neonatologist by background, is working with his research team to invent, develop and eventually bring to market and provide to developing countries a new, low-cost infant ventilator. The Hansen Ventilator is mechanically simple, much easier to produce, maintain, repair and operate, and far cheaper than current technology. The goal is to produce the new ventilators and save many more babies around the world by providing this practical, user-friendly ventilator that uses simple air bubbles in a small water tank with a tiny pinch valve to control oxygen flow. The Hansen Ventilator could replace the complex, expensive, high-tech (and high-maintenance) ventilators that don't serve well in the field or small rural clinics and village environments. Costing just a few hundred dollars to produce, it could revolutionize how the world treats and saves babies who need respiratory support.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Tom Hansen
• Hansen
• Seattle Children's
• ventilator
• newborn
• premature
• babies
• birth
• Seattle Children's Hospital
• CEO
• stillbirth
• prematurity
• developing countries
• pulmonary