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How can we improve newborn resuscitation?

Dhananjay recently celebrated his sixth birthday. But it almost did not happen.

When he was born, Dhananjay was not breathing. Fortunately, for him, his birth took place at a hospital that was a part of the Helping Babies Breathe program. The attending nurse, having been through specific training for such a scenario, was prepared to act. She began ventilation and, after some time, he finally started crying and his life was saved.

If newborn resuscitation is needed, it is important for health providers to be both confident and competent to provide timely and necessary intervention. There is a narrow window for when vital care is needed and, with proper training, medical professionals can provide high-quality care and reduce the risk of mortality and morbidity.

A global challenge

Nearly 1 million newborn deaths occur each year. Asphyxia, a lack of oxygen, is one of the leading causes of newborn deaths; approximately 10% of babies need help to breathe, and of those at least 1% will need bag-mask ventilation. But these deaths can be averted. With proper care, birth asphyxia is not fatal.

An opportunity for all

The NeoNatalie manikin has been used for over a decade in low-resource settings together with Helping Babies Breathe to improve newborn resuscitation. The program has helped to transform newborn care resulting in many stories like Dhananjay. Now, there is a new development that increases the value of training in newborn resuscitation.

NeoNatalie Live pairs the redesigned NeoNatalie manikin enhanced with smart electronics and connectivity with an app to simulate patient cases with varying difficulty levels. Learners have access to objective feedback on the quality of ventilation performance immediately after finishing training. The high fidelity of the scenarios and physiological response is enhanced based on the data from 1200, real resuscitation cases.

A significant portion of the research was undertaken by the Safer Births research project in Haydom, Tanzania. The team consists of researchers, health workers, engineers, and designers focused on developing sustainable, feasible, and adaptable training and therapy solutions to improve the quality of care at birth.

Designed from over 100,000 cases

Since 2016, the NeoNatalie Live project has been piloted across the world with over 100,000 training sessions to determine its viability as a learning and training platform.

With the implementation of NeoNatalie Live, the quality of care will likely increase, and thus increase the number of children being saved from birth asphyxia. Improving newborn resuscitation practice has a positive effect on competency and will give us more successful newborn survival stories.

To learn more about how you can work toward improving newborn resuscitation, join our upcoming webinar.

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NeoNatalie Live - Impactful training on newborn resuscitation skills

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