Limpopo Initiative for Newborn Care - LINC

Living Nelson Mandela's legacy... supporting pregnant women at Rethabile CHC in Polokwane

Living Nelson Mandela's legacy... supporting pregnant women at Rethabile CHC in Polokwane

We need to start empowering at risk mothers to know how to monitor foetal movement for stillbirths prevention.

Removing fear from discussions of the connection between fetal movement monitoring and stillbirth - Healthy Newborn Network While the association between stillbirth and fetal movement is thoroughly discussed within the research community and amongst those who study stillbirth, I do not think that many women are actually told that we need to understand fetal movement in order to prevent stillbirth.

2.6 million babies die in the first 28 days of life. Most of them in the first week. To achieve universal health coverage and ensure more newborns survive and thrive, we must leave no one behind.

Key Challenges that Health Workers face when trying to provide high quality maternity care include:

1) Human resources
- Staff shortages and heavy workloads hinder health workers’ ability to provide high quality care to every patient and can cause stress and frustration.
- Lack of specialists or experienced staff such as anesthesiologists can lead to unsafe task-shifting to unqualified personnel.
- Insufficient salaries, benefits and financial incentives often negatively affect motivation among health workers.
- Unsupportive management can leave health workers’ concerns unacknowledged or unaddressed.

2) Education and training
- Inadequate pre-service and in-service training limits health workers’ ability to provide skilled care, especially for high-risk pregnancies or deliveries.
- In-service trainings can be unaffordable, inconvenient or inaccessible for some staff members.

3) Commodities and health services infrastructure
- Unreliable availability of drugs, supplies and equipment can force health workers to administer suboptimal medications or provide care under unsafe or unsanitary conditions.
- Scarcity of blood or infrastructure for blood transfusions is dangerous in cases of obstetric emergencies such as postpartum hemorrhage.
- Poor access to electricity, fuel or clean water is a barrier to high quality care.
- Suboptimal physical layout or insufficient space can make health workers’ jobs more difficult.

4) Referral mechanisms
- Reluctance of mothers to be referred to a higher-level facility may result in midwives feeling pressured to handle high-risk deliveries when they are not comfortable doing so.
- Absence of transport or fuel prohibits transfer to another health facility.

Please do open this link for the full systematic review

Challenges Health Workers Face When Trying to Provide High Quality Maternity Care The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews recently published a qualitative evidence synthesis of factors that influence the provision of intrapartum and postnatal care by skilled birth attendants…

Kangaroo Father Care💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

A Kangaroo - Care Practicing Dad - Healthy Newborn Network This piece was originally published on Makerere University Centre of Excellence for Maternal Newborns and Child Health. My daily work involves moving around six hospitals in East-central Uganda implementing data strengthening interventions to increase capture and quantifying maternal and newborn ind...

Please check on the 2017 progress report for "Tracking progress towards
universal coverage for women’s,
children’s and adolescents’ health" - Countdown 2013

Countdown 2030

Saving Newborn Lives Champions Toolkit - Healthy Newborn Network Save the Children has a long and successful history of collaborating with newborn health champions to advocate for robust policies and programs to reduce global neonatal mortality. We have worked with pediatricians, midwives, members of parliament, ministers of health, journalists, celebrities, and…

Our Project Manager, Dr Joy Summerton, was on yesterday's Observer in an article about breastmilk donation. The article is on page page 34, please do check it out!

Congratulations to Dr Netsh*tuni on being the first black paediatric oncologist in SA! Limpopo need trailblazers like you for the better life of our children. Salute👏👏👏

Meet Vhutshilo Netsh*tuni, the first black paediatric oncologist in SA My News My Community - Sowetan LIVE.