Global Health Media Project has completed all 27 teaching videos in its Small Baby Series, providing in-depth coverage on best-practice care of babies born too small or too soon. Filmed in hospitals in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Nepal, the videos cover key topics including essential care, skin-to-skin care, a small baby’s feeding journey from tube to cup to breast, and monitoring a small baby’s growth. The videos are available in English, French, and Spanish.
The film series closely follows the Essential Care for Small Babies (ECSB) curriculum, a training program developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and based on the latest WHO guidelines. ECSB is one of four programs—along with Helping Babies Breathe, Essential Care for Every Baby, and Quality Improvement—that comprise the Helping Babies Survive program to reduce neonatal mortality in low-resource settings. While most of the videos are designed for health workers, several have been created for mothers to help them care for their babies both in the facility and at home.
The Small Baby Series is an especially important learning resource for frontline health workers in developing countries with literacy and language barriers. The videos draw the eyes and ears of trainees to all the subtle points essential to learning a skill such as cup feeding, expressing breastmilk, or positioning a baby for skin-to-skin care. Until now, there were no videos available that specifically addressed these key topics in low-resource settings where premature birth is the leading cause of death in children under five.
Global Health Media Project now has 91 videos on newborn and maternal care. The videos have been translated and narrated in 25 languages. A growing list of organizations are narrating videos in local languages to be used in their own community. If you would like to narrate the videos, please contact globalhealthmediaproject@gmail.com for more information.
The Small Baby Series was funded by the Laerdal Foundation and many individual and family donors. Global Health Media Project is a proud member of the Survive & Thrive Global Development Alliance, a public-private partnership working to improve health outcomes and help save lives of mothers, newborns, and children.
By Peter Cardellichio.
Associate Director, Global Health Media Project.