CHARLOTTESVILLE (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — Two members of the UVA cheer team were on hand at the UVA Health Medical Center on Thursday to help participate in the “Babies with Books” Read-a-thon, a yearly competition between NICUs designed to promote reading to babies and its benefits.
“Reading is a great way to help with brain and language development in our babies,” Anna Claire Fotopoulos, a registered nurse with the unit, said, “and it’s a great way for all of our NICU parents to bond with their babies. But we also have our doctors, speech, occupational and physical therapists, respiratory therapists and volunteer cuddler reading to our babies as well.”
This is UVA’s third year participating in the competition, which looks to see which NICU can read the most books to their babies in 10 days. While they have yet to win, the unit did read over 1700 books to their patients, outperforming their performance the previous year, in which the unit read over 500 books…