Prevent emergencies through improved labor management

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Around 140 million births occur every year in the world. The majority of these births have no identified risk factors at the onset of labor. Yet complications arise, and around 800 women and 7700 newborns die each day during pregnancy, childbirth and in the postnatal period. An additional 7300 women experience a stillbirth. A recent Lancet publication on patient safety (Kruk, 2018) shows that more people die of poor-quality treatment than access to treatment. Ensuring that comptency based traning and life saving equipments actually leads to improved care is of fundamental importance if we are to strengthen primary health care. It is very challenging to save the life of a newborn and a mother within severe emergencies such as birth asphyxia and severe bleedings. Research shows that preventing emergencies though improved essential care and improved management of critical situations has a very high life-saving potential. This project aims to improve quality of labor managment within three arenas of innovation: 1) An educational service to introduce and develop best practises for essential care for Labor and Birth 2) An educational service to introduce and develop best practises for managing complicated Labor and Birth 3) An educational service to introduce and develop best practises for Vacuum Assisted Delivery (VAD) 4) Solutions to support good decision making in teams during labor. We foresee innovative simulators to train assessment of progress of birth and management of fetal heartrate. We also foresee digital solutions for real time decision support during labor.