Imagine if you will, like many of our mothers we have featured, you have given birth to your baby too soon, or your baby has been born very sick. You have been referred to the best Neonatal Unit in the region, one which has national recognition and has dropped its death rate from 48% to 11% in 6 years. But when you reach there, you find a tiny room, built for 10 mamas and babies, squeezed to the brim with over 50 mothers and babies, no space to social distance, no space to rest or sleep. It feels crazy to squeeze yourself and your baby into this tiny space, especially with COVID19 everywhere, but you know the attention and care your baby will receive is one of the best in the country. You find a spot outside the ward to keep your belongings, and hope that it will not rain tonight or any night and that no one will take your belongings whilst you attend to your sick newborn.
We have been working closely with leading world experts at HKS architects together with Engineers for Overseas Development (Efod Charity) and ARUP to design a NEW Neonatal Centre of Excellence. An amazing team from HKS visited our current Neonatal Unit to work closely with the mothers, the neonatal staff and Born on the Edge to create a contextual design within the constraints of our low-resource setting.
The NEW Centre of Excellence aims to improve standards of care such as patient visibility, infection control and treatment of jaundice as well as create an environment suitable for increasing the newborn training and education we can provide.
The NEW Centre of Excellence will have some amazing features including:
- Beds for 52 babies and their mothers using the Mbale Mother Centred Model of newborn care, where mothers sleep alongside their babies to provide basic nursing care.
- A 10-bed high dependency unit (HDU)
- Linked to labour ward for easy transfer of small and sick babies
- Almost 100% visibility of all patients from the nursing station, suitable for low staff to patient ratios.
- Facilities to improve and focus on hand-washing on entering and whilst in the neonatal unit
- Rainwater harvesting and solar power
- Filtered sunshine for treatment of jaundice
- Small lecture room for training
- Adequate space in the ward to provide hands-on practical training for staff and students
Ultimately we envisage that this simple, affordable and practical design can be partnered with our successful clinical pathways to create a package of care that can be replicated in similar settings anywhere in the world.
Despite this amazing teamwork that has gone into the design of our new neonatal unit so far, we still need to raise the money to build it! Please share our work and encourage your friends and family to become regular monthly donors.
