22.01.2025

AYALA Charitable Foundation in Astana has signed the Memorandum of Cooperation with the Mother and Child Center UMC to develop the fetal surgery and neonatal ophthalmology in the Republic of Kazakhstan. This partnership shall reduce the disability of newborns and improve their health from the birth.

Gulmira Kurbanovna Rapilbekova, the Medical Director of UMC, has emphasized the importance of this cooperation: “Our Mother and Child Center UMC and AYALA Charitable Foundation have the very close fruitful cooperation for many years. The pilot project in UMC launched the successful scaling and application of the automatic hypothermia devices in the perinatal centers of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The Foundation supported the equipment of the neonatal ophthalmologist’s room with modern diagnostic devices. RetCam of the Foundation has diagnosed 1,176 newborns since 2023. The laser device, supplied by the Foundation, has saved 303 children from blindness. We hope that our cooperation will bring the important results and contribute to the development of the professional competences of the doctors of our clinic in the future.”    

UMC Clinic is the first medical center in the Central Asia, successfully accredited by JCI in 2024 as the Academic Medical Center. Last year, AYALA Charitable Foundation helped to conduct the training of fetal surgeons from the Mother and Child Center. As a result, UMC has begun to perform the complex fetal development pathology correction surgeries.

Massimo Pignatelli, the Vice-Director of Medicine and Dean of the School of Medicine of Nazarbayev University, has said, “The choice of the Mother and Child Center UMC as the principal clinic to launch the fetal surgery project is completely justified. Our Center has all possibilities for the perinatal diagnostics and follow-up of these patients, cytogenetic laboratory, ultrasonography, MRI-diagnostics, pregnancy care and follow-up departments and specialized neonatal surgery department. This generates the excellent conditions for the successful implementation of the fetal surgery project.”

Reducing the infantile disability in the Republic of Kazakhstan is the principal objective of the activities of AYALA Charitable Foundation. AYALA Foundation has been supplying the modern equipment to the children’s hospitals, maternity hospitals and research centers for 18 years, helping the doctors to save the lives and functional health of children. Memorandum between UMC and AYALA Charitable Foundation offers the new possibilities to improve the medical standards and save the lives of children in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

“The principal approach of our Foundation is the direct work with leading medical centers of the country. Assisting in the provision of equipment and in the improvement of doctors’ qualification, we completely rely on the expertise, experience and actual needs of medical professionals. This helps to obtain the maximum results as soon as possible and these results are expressed in the saved health of newborns. I would like to thank the UMC management for our fruitful partnership”, — said Aidan Suleymenova, the Founder and the President of AYALA Charitable Foundation.    

AYALA Charitable Foundation implements its projects within 3 Memoranda with the Ministry of Healthcare of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The result of the Foundation activities within the first Memorandum is the provision of all intensive care units of the perinatal centers of the Republic of Kazakhstan with the equipment to nurse the extremely preterm newborns, reducing the infant mortality rate by 3.5 times by 2015. Within the second Memorandum, the Foundation has equipped the third part of all perinatal centers of the country with automatic hypothermia devices; these devices have saved the lives of some hundreds of children. Within the third Memorandum, the Foundation has supplied 16 ophthalmoscopes, 11 RetCams, 6 laser units and 163 vials of Lucentis to 22 medical centers of the Republic of Kazakhstan since 2022. This equipment has diagnosed more than 11,000 children; more than 500 premature newborns have been saved from the complete blindness.