“Every year, 2.6 million babies die before turning one month old. One million of them take their first and last breaths on the day they are born. Another 2.6 million are stillborn. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, especially because the vast majority are preventable. More than 80 per cent of newborn deaths are the result of premature birth, complications during labour and delivery and infections such as sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia.” https://data.unicef.org/resources/every-child-alive-urgent-need-end-newborn-deaths/
The object of the charity is:
To relieve sickness and to promote and protect the good health of babies and children. To work to reduce mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries, by assisting in the provision of training courses and other healthcare projects.
OUR MISSION is to make outstanding care of newborn babies commonplace in poorly resourced areas of the world
We do this by training healthcare workers in neonatal life support, using a Newborn Care course specifically designed for low and medium resource settings.
Crucially, we also teach course candidates how to deliver this training to their own healthcare colleagues.
Once qualified in neonatal life support, they are able to return to their own healthcare facilities and embed the best practices they have learned.
When qualified as instructor trainers, they can in turn run their own courses, cascading skills and knowledge to their colleagues.
Once sufficient instructors are sharing their training, our work is mostly done. Training and practice become sustainable and can continue without further input from NICHE international instructors on the ground.
We continue to support the Continuing Professional Development of the local instructors, preventing skills decay, working alongside the Advanced Life Support Group to ensure that training standards are maintained and course materials kept up to date and evidence based.
Door to labour ward, CB Dunbar, Liberia
Kola shows us around the neonatal unit he is developing in a hospital that previously had no neonatal care at all
Medication doses poster on the wall of the neonatal unit
Homemade bubble CPAP – pressurised humidified oxygen delivery into the nostrils of a premature baby to support their breathing. We talk about “centimetres of water” in the UK when describing the pressure of gases delivered to the baby’s nose. I never understood the physics of this before being shown, in Cameroon, how to make CPAP with a bottle of mineral water and an oxygen concentrator. Ingenious.
