First meeting with NICHE International
11 Dec 2020
The partnership that would become this training programme begins.
Since our first meeting with NICHE International in December 2020, this partnership has trained hundreds of healthcare workers in emergency newborn care — and we're making great progress at building a sustainable pool of experienced local instructors to run courses without international assistance.
Newborns in the regions NICHE works in face up to 10 times the risk of dying in their first month of life compared to the UK. The Neonatal Care Course (NCC) trains healthcare workers to bring that down — covering newborn resuscitation, resource-appropriate clinical skills, and the fundamentals of general care such as keeping babies warm and supporting breastfeeding.
Teaching combines lectures, small-group workshops, low-fidelity simulation and hands-on skills stations. Find out more on the NICHE International website →
The NCC was put together by two UK charities — the Advanced Life Support Group (ALSG) and MCAI (Maternal and Child Health Advocacy International) — and has since been refined through feedback from local instructors and learners across every country it's been taught in.
NICHE runs this course under its own 10 steps to sustainability framework — a staged plan for moving away from international faculty as local instructor capacity builds, until the course can be run entirely by the people it originally trained. Ruhija isn't the first place this has been tried.
Running since 2014 across six hospitals with the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services. The first course led entirely by Cameroonian instructors ran in Bamenda in January 2020 — and local faculty kept running courses independently through both the pandemic and a period of civil unrest.
Currently step 8Running since 2018, supporting the work of MCAI. A Generic Instructor Course launched in 2019 to build local instructors, and a complete teaching set was handed over to local leadership — local teams have been running courses independently since.
Currently step 8Every course funded or supported by Child Health Matters since our first meeting with NICHE.
204 healthcare workers trained in the Neonatal Care Course and 12 qualified as local instructors since 2022, across five completed trips to Bwindi Community Hospital — plus a further 49 trained in Kabale District, the programme's first step beyond where it started.
At least one Neonatal Care Course has now been run in Ruhija with 4 local faculty and a local course director — no international presence required for the NCC itself. Twelve local instructors are fully qualified. What's still missing is a local course director for the Generic Instructor Course — the course that trains the trainers.
Reaching step 9 and step 10 matters because of what it unlocks — two things, really.
£5,000 keeps a course — and the local instructors it trains — on schedule.