By Adam Hewitt-Smith | Trustee
The last three months have been a busy period for our team in eastern Uganda. Led by our neonatal specialist, Dr Kathy Burgoine and working in partnership with Mbale Regional Referral Hospital there have been over 550 newborn babies admitted to the neonatal unit over this short time. Babies can present to the ward because they are born too soon, because they are too small or because they are sick with infections or other illnesses that threaten their tiny lives.
However amazing our team is at providing clinical care, we would like to focus on an equally important role that they play in the community that cares for newborn babies in eastern Uganda. Your donations are allowing us to continue to work closely with our three clinical trainers. Kathy, Juliet and Linda are responsible for supervising junior staff, providing hands on support to nursing staff from Mbale Regional Referral Hospital and for providing outreach training sesssions across the region.
We would like to focus this report on our Newborn Care Training Courses that we are running in four lower level health facilities surrounding Mbale. This ten week course teaches midwives and nurses basic neonatal care and pre-referral management. We will be completing our third training course this week and our fourth in a couple of weeks time. That means over 80 members of staff will have better knowledge and skills than before.
Although each week’s teaching has a practical element, Module 5 is all hands-on. When our neonatal training team travelled to Busiu Health Centre IV to teach the 18 midwives working there and the surrounding health centre IIIs, it was so much fun and everyone learnt so much. We were additionally lucky during this course because a generous supporter from the UK had fundraised to allow us to provide a Laerdal ambu-bag and penguin sucker to each of the health centres! The ladies we were training were thrilled to be armed not only with the skills but the equipment to save newborn lives!
A special thank you must also go to our amazing trainers, whose passion energy and knowledge is second to none!
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