The ‘Pre-Hospital Newborn Stabilisation & Transport to Hospital’ course (run by GWH NHS Trust in partnership with WAA – SWASfT & www.swastcpd.co.uk) has just won national recognition at the UK Neonatal Transport Group Conference in Southampton & are discussing a national roll out!
Click here to download the award winning poster info-graphic that they presented.
This was a multi professional team led by Dr Sarah Bates – (Consultant Paediatrician & Neonatologist, University of Bristol Undergraduate Tutor for Paediatrics and Neonatology, BAPM Executive Committee & Neonatal CRG LNU/SCU Representative).
They delivered a great days training with a team of CCPs from WAA, and SWASfT Staff.
This was a pilot ‘proof of concept course’, and the results were very promising, feedback was great , and we are now looking to deliver another course or two before Dr. Bates and her team can take this forward to see if it can be rolled out nationally. (It’s that good!)
Here Dr Bates talks about the context and the conception of the course:
‘I have been directing the national Resuscitation Council (UK) Newborn Life Support (NLS) course for many years. It has been enormously successful in standardising skills and knowledge in newborn resuscitation across the country, and undoubtedly has saved many many babies. However, it is largely focused on hospital births and planned home births.
Every year we see a number of babies bought in by Paramedics (or the WAA) who have delivered unexpectedly very early at home, or where a baby has been born unexpectedly unwell after a planned home birth. Sadly, these babies have high rates of death and disability. The teams (such as Paramedics, and the WAA team) who get called to these emergencies do not have many opportunities to get bespoke pre-hospital Newborn Resuscitation training. I’ve therefore been working with SWAST and delivering occasional ad-hoc training out at the ambulance stations, but, around a year ago, started to work in partnership with SWAST (and with Ben, (Abbott- WAA) and the WAA Critical Care Paramedics team) to develop a brand new course in Pre-Hospital Newborn Life Support.
We ran the first pilot course in September here at GWH. Each candidate group had a community midwife, paramedics, and a WAA Critical Care Paramedic working together as a team, mimicking the team that might be called to such emergencies in real life. The feedback from the course was amazing.
The next step is to try to run two more courses over 2 days in 2020, and the RCUK representatives will come from Newcastle & Plymouth to teach on the courses with us, to help fine tune it, develop it, and prepare it for wider roll out. ‘