An Integrated Newborn Care Kit to Save Lives

Almost every newborn death should be preventable. However, this year, nearly 3 million newborns will die within the first month of life. With 46 newborn deaths for every 1000 live births. Pakistan has the highest newborn mortality rate in the world.

Gilgit-Baltistan, the rugged northern most region of Pakistan is the home one of the world’s highest mountain ranges and is without a doubt, one of the most stunning landscapes on the planet. However, this geography also brings incredible health challenges, particularly for pregnant women and newborns due to poverty and difficulties in accessing essential health care. Many villages in remote valleys and high on the mountains have no paved roads and can be cut off due to heavy snow or landslides. The Integrated Newborn Care Kit (iNCK), delivered to women by Lady Health Workers during the third trimester of pregnancy, is intended to help women delivery their babies safely and ensure a healthy newborn period for families in these remote areas of Gilgit-Baltistan.

With your support, along with generous donations from 2 Canadian-based funding agencies, we officially started distributing the life-saving kits in March 2022 and are currently collecting data to understand the effectiveness of the iNCK in saving newborn lives and reducing neonatal infections. As of November, 2022 we have identified over 7000 pregnant women for enrollment into this study and distributed over 3000 iNCKs, a great start towards our goal of over 20,000 pregnant women.

In June 2022 and again in September 2022 we completed site visits to Gilgit-Baltistan and met in person the iNCK field team including field supervisors and data collectors as well as Lady Health Workers (LHW) and Community Midwives who are delivering and using the iNCK. We also met at length with mothers who had recently delivered babies and used the iNCK both at the time of their home deliveries and in the early days of the newborn’s life. Mothers, Lady Health Workers, and community midwives were all incredibly happy and thankful for the iNCK and we were impressed with how well the different iNCK components were being used by mothers.

The iNCK program is not only aiming to save newborn and maternal lives, it is also providing employment opportunities for young women and men in the area. The local iNCK team is passionate about improving the health of women and newborns in their communities and are doing an incredible job in the most challenging of landscapes. The data collectors travel for hours every day on unpaved road in valleys and up mountains to reach villages and build trusting relationships with women, families, and Lady Health Workers. We hope this experience working on the iNCK project will build their skills and capacity and will allow them to further their careers or education in a region where options for young people can be limited.

Current challenges we face in the project include disruptions due to COVID-19 as well as dramatic inflation that has both increased the cost of fuel and transportation needed to move around the project area and reduced the effective real salaries for our amazing field team. A new challenge we are facing is our first winter of the project. Many of the families who live in the valleys of GB are cut off by snow, avalanches, and road closures, however, our goal remains to be to identify pregnant women and make sure they have iNCKs throughout this most challenging time of the year. Ensuring ongoing project activities through the winter requires innovative new strategies.

We continue to raise funds to deliver the iNCK and collect data about its effectiveness and to support the young men and women who are working for the project.

Our long-term goal remains to gather enough evidence to present to local and national governments to gain support for wide scaled-up sustainable distribution of the iNCK in Pakistan and other similar resource-constrained settings.

Thank you for your continuous support in helping us achieve our goal.