(Source of Funding: International Community Access to Child Health (ICATCH), American Academy of Pediatrics- 2022)
Overall Goal: To extend access to an established and proven Newborn Care Training Course (NCTC) that has been developed and piloted in eastern Uganda to improve knowledge and skills in the hospital-based care of small and sick newborns, by Dr Kathy Burgoine and her team.
Our project will be in three new training sites in Zambia, Malawi and Kenya. The neonatal mortality rate in the three countries selected remains unacceptably high (27, 27 and 21 per 1000 live births in Zambia, Malawi and Kenya respectively). The leading causes of mortality in all these countries are complications of preterm birth, birth asphyxia and infections.
The selected training sites are all referral hospitals that are already part of our established Neonatal Nutrition Network for sub-Saharan Africa (NeoNuNet: https://www.lstmed.ac.uk/nnu). They all have limited specialist newborn care staff. Junior doctors and general nurses with limited newborn care skills are often the ones to provide care to these vulnerable infants. This situation has arisen as a result of the inadequate pre-service and in-service training on newborn care in these countries. In addition, where available, in-service training is prohibitively expensive and requires healthcare workers to attend courses away from their workstations therefore impacting their income and the human resources available at their workstation.
To address, this problem, we will pilot the delivery of the NCTC to healthcare workers in the newborn care units in these three sites. The course will be free and available to all cadres of healthcare workers. The team leads at each hospital (Dr Kunda Mutesu-Kapembwa, Ms Mwanamvua Boga, Ms Maureen Majamanda) will be trained and mentored virtually as trainers of trainers by master trainers from Uganda. The team leads at each hospital are expected to train twenty health workers each year for three years at their site. We will evaluate the acquisition of knowledge and skills for the hospital-based care of small and sick newborns.