Support our newborn care training team

When babies are born in difficulty, they need help to breath. These first few breaths may make the difference between life and death. Helping babies to breath at birth is a skill that needs to be taught and takes time and experience to perfect. Unfortunately in many countries around the world this vital skill is poorly taught during basic training. 

One of the key concepts of Helping Babies Breath is the idea of a golden minute. Within one minute of birth, a baby should be breathing well or should be ventilated with a bag and mask. The golden minute identifies the steps that a healthcare worker must take immediately after birth to evaluate the baby and stimuate breathing. 

With almost 10,000 deliveries at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital, all of the nursing and midwifery staff in the department could find themselves faced with the need to resuscitate a newborn baby at any point. With support from another charitable organistion called ATLAS International, Inc. our neonatal trainers Juliet and Linda have been hard at work providing refresher training for staff at the hospital. Almost 40 members of staff completed the refresher training programme. 

As we approach international womens day, we would like to use this opportunity to thank you for your contributions that have been used to support our neonatal clinical trainers. We are proud of the hard work that Juliet, Linda and Kathy do and are continually amazed by the impact they have on the lives of the most vulnerable babies. Their work is dependent on donations from kind and generous people like you. We are creeping closer to our target but please consider helping us reach it soon by donating today. 

We wanted to share some of our stories with you in our quarterly reports. Stories provide a real measure of the impact that your donations make to the lives of our tiny babies and their families in eastern Uganda. 

Babies who are born too soon (preterm) or who are very sick are often unable to feed for themselves. Without an alternative way of feeding them they would get thinner and thinner and could not survive. For the smallest and sickest, a feeding tube passing through the nose into the stomach is the safest option. Just four years ago feeding tubes were not accepted by the majority of our mothers in eastern Uganda. The tubes were often refused by the mothers and sometimes even removed by them. Now the positive attitude of the staff and the good experience from fellow mothers means that mothers are asking us for feeding tubes!

The key to this change in attitude has been the training of our staff. The clinical trainers who you support through our fundraising campaign teach them how to correctly place feeding tubes, how to check them, how to use them safely and how to counsel the mothers as to their importance in the care of their babies. 

“Thank you so much for teaching me how to make a baby breath, before today I have not been doing it right since school. Now I can truly save lives!”

This quote came from one of the nursing staff attending our fun and rewarding afternoon of practical training in neonatal resuscitation, kangaroo care, feeding tubes and expressing breast milk. This is the fifth module of our 14 module Newborn Care Training Course. We now run the course every year at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital and it is open to any nurses, midwives or clinicians who work in obstetrics, paediatrics and neonatalogy.

We are reliant on you to support our trainers who in turn provide life saving treatment to sick babies in eastern Uganda and life saving training to their colleagues and friends around them. Please consider giving a christmas gift to our fundraising campaign and help us make an even greater impact in 2019.