Every Breath Counts: CHAL and Difaem Train Health Workers in Neonatal Resuscitation
A newborn’s first breath is the most critical moment in its life — and the difference between a skilled responder and an untrained one in that moment can determine whether a child lives or dies. That is the conviction driving CHAL’s Hospital Partnership on Neonatal Resuscitation, a programme delivered in collaboration with the German Institute for Medical Mission (Difaem) and simulation specialists PAEDSIM from the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany. Running from September 2022 to November 2023, the project targeted three of CHAL’s anchor hospitals — Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Curran Lutheran Hospital, and Foya Borma Hospital — with the singular objective of ensuring that health staff in each facility could confidently and competently resuscitate a newborn according to international clinical standards.
The programme’s centrepiece was a two-day refresher training held in Ganta City, Nimba County in October 2023, attended by 15 participants drawn from all three hospitals — including medical doctors, physician assistants, midwives, and registered nurses. Three participants who had benefited from the original November 2022 training stepped up as co-facilitators, a deliberate design choice that builds local training capacity rather than perpetuating dependence on external expertise. The session was co-facilitated online by Carina Dinkel from Difaem and Roman Kremling from PAEDSIM, with in-person facilitation from Ganta UMH midwife Glangbah Dahn, paediatrics nurse Felecia Gborweah, and nurse educator Patricia Y. Larblah from Winifred J. Harley College of Health Sciences. The hybrid model — international clinical expertise combined with locally rooted facilitation — reflected exactly the kind of sustainable capacity building CHAL strives to embed in its member network.
The impact showed immediately in the data. Across the three participating hospitals, neonatal deaths fell to zero in the second and third quarters of 2023 — down from one death each in the preceding two quarters — while the number of babies kept for intensified monitoring and therapy rose, indicating more proactive clinical assessment rather than missed cases. Every staff member trained can now confidently perform neonatal resuscitation to standard. For communities in Lofa and Nimba Counties where Foya Borma, Curran Lutheran, and Ganta United Methodist are often the only referral option for complicated deliveries, that competence is not a statistic. It is the reason a mother goes home with a living child.
