Background
Almost a quarter of all newborn deaths in Uganda are caused by oxygen deficiency during delivery, also known as birth asphyxia. Many of these deaths could be prevented if health workers had more training on how to resuscitate newborns. At Mbale Regional Hospital, many midwives lacked formal training on newborn resuscitation and some of them, who had been trained in the past, had not participated in any refresher training for several years.

About the project
This project was created to improve the quality of newborn care at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital. The project team arranged three-day trainings for the hospital’s midwives on basic resuscitation skills to save the lives of newborns. The midwives also received coaching in their daily work. To remind them of the steps to take when resuscitating a newborn, the team developed pedagogical pictures and put them up on the wall for the health workers to look at when needed.

Results
By the end of the project, 22 midwives had been trained on basic newborn resuscitation skills and 91 babies were successfully resuscitated between mid-February and the end of March 2010. The project improved the hospital staff’s emergency preparedness, for example by having an infant resuscitation tray available during deliveries and purchasing more resuscitation equipment for the hospital. Going forward, annual trainings will be conducted for all midwives at the hospital to ensure their knowledge and skills on newborn resuscitation are updated on a regular basis.

Year: 2009