Simple training helps newborn struggling to breathe
Sixty seconds can mean the difference between life and death for a newborn
When Mrs Rikta, a 20 year old went into labour, her husband called a local health assistant and skilled birth attendant Sakhina Begum to assist the delivery. Within two hours, Rikta delivered a baby girl, her second born. When Sakhina dried and wrapped up the baby's body, she felt no breathing and heard no cries of the baby. Rather, everyone in the labour room started crying thinking the baby had little chance to survive. Luckily Sakhina had attended the USAID supported Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) training for skilled birth attendants only a week before attending this birth. She used her training and kept the newborn on the mother's abdomen, trying to stimulate the newborn by rubbing the skin over the backbone, but the baby was still not breathing. She quickly did the next — what she had been trained to do — resuscitation using a bag and mask. She immediately took out a penguin sucker, including bag and mask that was given to her during the training, and tried to resuscitate the newborn. Within a minute the baby cried out! The HBB training helped Sakhina and thousand others like her to quickly identify the danger signs within the golden minute of the lives of newborns and provided the tools to take action and save lives. Statistics say that about 57 percent of all deaths of children under the age of five are within the first four weeks of birth. Approximately one fourth of these deaths are due to due to an inability to breathe immediately after delivery, which is called birth asphyxia. However, growing evidence shows that a large proportion of newborn deaths and diseases can be avoided by implementing simple, low-cost interventions during delivery, and in the days and weeks after deliveries at home or in a facility. For example, a simple and immediate newborn assessment, along with warming, drying and tactile stimulation, are the first steps of neonatal resuscitation. There are a small proportion of babies, however, that do not breathe at birth. These require ventilation.
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