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Expanding provision of care to all newborns, including the most vulnerable ones, is imperative to make progress towards the goal of ending preventable newborn deaths by 2030. The webinar presented how people-centered care can offer lessons on how to transform care for small and sick newborns. It also presented the powerful role that parents can play to improve care of their vulnerable newborns.
Dr. Lily Kak presented the key findings of the 1st chapter ‘Now is the time to transform care for Newborns’ of the Survive and Thrive: transforming care for every small and sick newborn report, which highlights these key points:
- Meeting global targets for the survival of newborns and children aged under 5 years requires adding special and intensive levels of care to well-established obstetric and essential newborn health services.
- Every newborn has the right to survive and thrive.
- Family-centred care offers proven benefits for newborns, as well as for parents, families and health workers.
- Lessons from the past inform priorities for our future.
Silke Mader talked about strategies for integrated people-centered health services, and what this means when caring for small and sick newborns. She explained the potential of parents in advising inpatient newborn care units on improving care for those vulnerable newborns. She also shared her personal story as a parent of children born too soon.
Dr. Ornella Lincetto put the provision of services for small and sick newborns in the context of the COVID 19 pandemic. She explained that these services remain core essential services during the pandemic and presented some of the guidance on Covid-19 and newborn health.
The presentations were followed by a Q&A session, with questions about the link between parent-centered care and quality of care, the challenges of having parents in overcrowded, understaffed NICUs, the difficulty of caring for small and sick newborns in facilities that lack proper WASH infrastructure, the training of neonatal nurses on intensive care, and more.
This is the first webinar in a series on Transforming care for newborns, organized by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, in collaboration with the Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.
