Established in 2012 at Haydom Lutheran Hospital in Tanzania, the Safer Births Consortium has become the world's most extensive research and development program for birth asphyxia.
The collaboration has resulted in new training and clinical innovations, in addition to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.
Through the Safer Births project, we obtained new essential knowledge about newborns and developed more efficient training methods.
When implemented well as a Safer Births Bundle, the project proved that the innovations have the potential to create impact and improve perinatal survival on a global scale.
The Safer Births report summarizes the history, implementation, and learnings from the Safer Births project until 2019.
As a result of the Safer Births research, four innovative tools were made to enable health workers to make time-critical lifesaving decisions on the spot. The Safer Births Bundle is a collection of both training and clinical tools to ultimately help prevent and treat the leading causes of newborn and maternal deaths.
Moyo
Fetal Heart Rate Monitor
Upright
Bag Mask Ventilator, with/without PEEP
NeoBeat
Newborn Heart Rate Meter
NeoNatalie Live
Newborn Ventilation Trainer
The Safer Births Bundle of Care consists of the original Safer Births Bundle, plus selected clinical innovations, training innovations, and a set of solutions around continuous quality improvement and sustainability.
The solutions in the Safer Births Bundle of Care are provided by LGH together with key partners and have shown promising results in Tanzania.
Fast and reliable fetal and newborn heart rate monitoring, efficient bag-mask ventilation and improved maternal care.
In-service simulation training for helping mothers and newborns survive.
Actionable data for treatment and competence management through low-dose high-frequency refresher training at the worksite.
SimBegin: A facilitator course designed for implementing simulation as a methodology for training and quality improvement.
LIFT: The Learning Improvement Facilitation Tool integrates several systems digitally, supporting training into one coherent application built for low-resource settings.
Supported by strong MoH ownership, regular mentorship and supportive supervision.
In 2020 Safer Births project received funding from Global Financing Facility (a part of the World Bank) to scale up Safer Births Bundle of Care to 30 hospitals divided over 5 regions in Tanzania, covering 500,000 births/year. Watch the scale-up video.
Based on the positive preliminary results from the project, the Safer Births Bundle of Care was awarded an additional 8.5 million USD from the Global Financing Facility to further scale up in Tanzania.
We aim to guide how to inspire other countries to do the same. To save more lives. Together.
