Health workers trained by NICHE International support colleagues in Cameroon.

Health centres run by the Cameroon Baptist Health Convention, our partners in Cameroon, share their maternal and neonatal mortality data with their Health Districts. They aim to learn from incidents. Grace and her colleagues were invited to Nkoabang Baptist Health Centre, Nkoabang Village on the Eastern edge of Yaoundé this week to deliver 2 days of training to the staff as one of the outcomes of a neonatal death review.

The topics covered are resuscitation at birth, new born infections, convulsions, and fluid and electrolyte balance.

Three experienced nurses who have trained as trainers with NICHE are leading the training.

This is a good way of learning from incidents and sharing the knowledge, and is vital to saving babies’ lives in Cameroon.

Health workers who have done the Neonatal Care Course, use a confidential WhatsApp group to seek advice about clinical problems of babies they are caring for, and also to talk about neonatal deaths that have occurred in their own health facilities.

This information enables midwives and nurses to support each other in their work, and is valuable in indicating where further training might be useful.

COVID-19 in West Africa

There are 14 confirmed cases in Liberia at the moment, 3 deaths.  Cameroon has many more – 658 cases and 9 reported deaths on 6th April.  Grace recently sent a picture of 2 midwives in full PPE having just delivered a premature baby of a young woman with COVID-19.  Cameroon, at least the francophone part, will be better equipped to deal with this than Liberia but we are certainly all willing the hot weather to slow the spread of this virus in parts of the world that simply don’t have the equipment to support the lives of people with respiratory failure.  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200323-coronavirus-will-hot-weather-kill-covid-19 is an interesting article looking at the evidence for and against the theory that weather might matter.