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About us

About us

Laerdal Global Health exists to help reach the Sustainable Development Goals for maternal and newborn health (SDG3). We believe that this can be achieved if we work in close collaboration with partners to innovate and support health providers.

Innovating means finding solutions together, to have a sustainable impact on the survival and the quality of life of mothers and babies. No matter where they are in the world.

We were established in 2010 as the not-for-profit sister company to Laerdal Medical, in Stavanger, Norway.

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Laerdal Global Health is Born

Excerpt from the book "One Million Lives"

The story behind the One Million Lives goal starts in 2010, when Laerdal established the not-for-profit sister company, Laerdal Global Health (LGH), and became a dedicated member of the Helping Babies Breathe Global Development Alliance established by USAID.

Some years before, in 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) invited Laerdal to collaborate on developing a much-simplified and culturally-adapted course in newborn resuscitation to meet the needs in low-resource settings. Laerdal responded by providing educational design for the course that was to become widely known as Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) and the low-cost simulator, NeoNatalie, to make the training more engaging and effective. Lifesaving equipment, the Penguin Suction and the Upright Resuscitator, also became available as part of the program. When presented in 2008, the project elicited much enthusiasm. Testing in India, Kenya and Tanzania yielded ground-breaking knowledge: the HBB program was born.

Since then, large-scale studies that evaluated HBB programs in Tanzania and Nepal showed a 47% reduction in early 24-hour neonatal mortality and a 24% reduction in fresh stillbirths. This spurred further motivation to bring these innovations to scale.

Helping Babies and Mothers Survive

The tremendous interest that HBB raised triggered the obvious question: if hundreds of thousands of birth attendants could be reached by this course, would this be opportunity to also train them to prevent the number one killer of mothers, uncontrolled bleeding after birth?

Laerdal teamed up with Jhpiego, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, the leading NGO for maternal care. This inspired the development of the birthing simulator MamaNatalie as well as the Helping Mothers Survive (HMS) program.

With inclusion of the HMS program, the HBB alliance developed into the Survive & Thrive public-private partnership, including professional associations, the private sector, NGOs and others. Although the formal partnership ended in 2017, its educational programs are reaching more than 100,000 new birth attendants every year by being embedded in national programs and through initiatives such as 50,000 Happy Birthdays.

Together with its partners, LGH has developed 25 products and programs over the company’s first ten years. These products are provided on a not-for-profit basis to the countries with the highest maternal and newborn mortality, and have reached more than 750,000 birth attendants.

 

One Million Lives: read the book

One shared commitment

Laerdal Medical

Laerdal Medical is one of the world's leading providers of healthcare training solutions, dedicated to helping save lives. For more than 50 years, healthcare providers and educators have trusted Laerdal Medical to offer solutions that help improve patient outcomes and survival. Laerdal Medical is a sister company to Laerdal Global Health.

Visit laerdal.com

Laerdal Foundation

The Laerdal Foundation supports research of best practices and practical implementations in acute medicine. To date, the foundation has supported 1 800 international research projects with more than 40 million dollars in funding. Through 2020, 50% of the annual appropriations is earmarked for research projects related to Saving Lives at Birth.

Visit laerdalfoundation.org