Kangaroo Mother Care helps Sunita’s baby

When 16 years old Sunita Lama from Sankhu was expecting her first baby, she learnt about the benefit of nutritious food, vitamins, iron tablets, calcium and regular health check us from CDO Nepal and regular visits in health post. The health post health workers and Female Community health volunteer (FCHV) Ram Maya also advised her and family to the baby delivered at the health post but she have prolonged labor at home before she was brought to the health post where she gave birth to a baby girl with the help from Sun Maya an auxiliary Nurse and midwife at the health post. However the baby did not cry or breathe. Sun Maya , She is well experience and a lot of community based new born care(CBNC) training started stimulating the baby by rubbing her back. When there was no response, Sun Maya used the dee-lee suction to initiate breathing. When both these methods did not work, Sun Maya used the bag and mask to resuscitate the baby. To everyone one’s relief the baby started crying a while.

Since the baby was also underweight. CDO health worker and FCHV –Ram Maya come to the house to checkup the baby frequently and teach the family to give skin to skin care knows as KANGAROO Mother care( KMC). to the baby. Sunita, her husband and mother in law took turn in the month after the baby’s birth to provide KMC. A low cost methods to save low birth weight babies. KMC has been proven very effective for low birth weight babies. It serves as a human incubator for the babies to maintain temperature and gain weight through frequent feeding which it promotes. Sun maya recall’ I have seen many babies born like that not breathing, I didn’t know how to save them . Now since the CBNC training. I have saved few babies with the bag and mask technique”