The Helping Babies Breathe project has been developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics in collaboration with WHO, Save the Children, USAid and others. When fully implemented on a global scale, the project has an ambitious goal of saving over half of the one million babies that die every year from birth asphyxia (oxygen deprivation due to lack of spontaneous breathing at birth). In addition, it is believed that the simple resuscitation techniques taught in the course can save several hundred thousand babies that would otherwise be classified as stillborn, and also prevent brain damage among many others.
Tanzania has been selected as the first country for national implementation of this global initiative. The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare will introduce a national training program that will provide training to 1 300 instructors and more than 10 000 care providers in basic neonatal resuscitation adopting a cascade model approach. The training will take place during the following 18 months.
The educational material is funded by the Norwegian Lærdal Foundation for Acute Medicine. Lærdal Medical has developed a neonatal simulator and resuscitation equipment to be used in the training, and the employees of Laerdal Medical have raised funds to donate instruction materials for all 1400 instructors who will take part in the training.
The Embassy welcomes these initiatives and will follow the project closely as part of Norway’s support to the achievement of MDG4 in Tanzania. The project is of critical relevance in Tanzania, and will certainly contribute towards the overall effort to extend child survival in Tanzania. Each year, at least 51 000 newborns die in Tanzania, an additional 43 000 babies are stillborn. One of the most common causes of newborn deaths in Tanzania is birth asphyxia, which contributes to as much as 27 percent of neonatal deaths in the country, and in addition contributes substantially to disabilities in survivors. Interventions to reduce newborn deaths and disabilities include proper monitoring of labour and appropriate resuscitation of newborns. However the necessary skills to perform proper resuscitation are not always applied due limited skills and knowledge among service providers, as well as a lack of basic resuscitation equipment.
Launching the programme, the Permanent Secretary, Ms Blandina Nyoni, said she hoped to see a drastic reduction in the deaths of newborn babies. According to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the implementation of the Helping Babies Breathe project is expected to reduce the incidence of asphyxia related mortality by 50 per cent (from 13260 cases in 2006 to 6630 in 2015) and to reduce the equivalent number (appr 13,000) of wrongly classified stillbirth deaths (i.e. newborns with heart activity that is difficult to pick up at delivery without the appropriate equipment and training), by 25%.
A national monitoring and evaluation framework will be put in place, and 10 research sites with a collaborating institution have been identified, among them Haydom Lutheran Hospital, which will play a central role in both implementation and research. Lærdal Foundation for Acute Medicine will fund two PhD stipends for evaluation of implementation and the results.
The launch symposium gathered more than 80 representatives from the MOHSW, WHO, Save the Children, JHPIEGO, USAID, the US and Norwegian Embassies and others. And the event received good media coverage, a.o. the front page story in The Citizen newspaper on September 10th. The full story can be read at http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=14985