Healthy Children Project’s Kajsa Brimdyr captured new skin-to-skin footage in 2017 based on the understanding that staff and patients could benefit from seeing successful skin-to-skin implementation with mothers and babies that they felt they could relate to more closely.

To combat the rate of infant mortality worldwide, a team of experts traveled to Uganda to help a small rural hospital implement skin to skin in the first hour after birth. Intervention is particularly critical in Uganda, where, in 2015, the neonatal mortality rate was 18.7 deaths per 1,000 live births.

Our colleagues from Sweden and Uganda have published a paper based on the work of this project entitled “Experience of perceived barriers and enablers of safe uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact during the first hour after birth in Uganda”. The highlights of the paper include

• Making use of health professionals’ knowledge facilitates changes in practice.
• Experiencing benefits of skin-to-skin contact alter attitudes.
• Involvement in change brings about new initiatives.
• Education on skin-to-skin contact in the community is essential.
• Medical training should have learning outcomes how to conduct skin-to-skin contact.

Read more about the research, including the objectives and conclusions (although the paper itself is not open access):
Experience of perceived barriers and enablers of safe uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact during the first hour after birth in Uganda

A second paper about this project was published in the African Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health in  2019:
A low-cost intervention to promote immediate skin-to-skin contact and improve temperature regulation in Northern Uganda

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