Médecins Sans Frontières - REPORT: Neonatal care in Khamer, Yemen (ENG)

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF277119

Date taken / Date Recorded 23/04/2019 12:00 AM

Country Yemen

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Benoit Finck

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) MSF Fundraising, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available yes

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m43s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 294.23 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist Khamer
Yemen

Al Salam hospital

The neonatal unit, supported by MSF,
admits around 80 newborn babies every month.

After several hours on the road,
a mother enters the emergency room with her baby

The baby is immediately admitted to the neonatal unit.

Jane Hancock
MSF nurse

This baby is a 12-day-old baby admitted today from the emergency department.
He lives about two hours away.
The mum’s brought him in because he was not feeding properly, crying a lot.
A lot of the problems here with malnourishment
and the babies that are admitted here
is because breastfeeding is something that people do
but people don’t talk about and people don’t do well.
So we’re always trying to educate the mothers
on how to increase their breastmilk supply.
A lot of people, the reason they’re not breastfeeding well
is because they don’t have enough money,
they don’t have enough food or water
because their lives are falling apart because of the war.

Breastfeeding is about emotions as well.
If you are living in a stressful environment
you are not going to produce breastmilk.
And this is a very stressful environment.

It looks like he’s feeding very well.
He’s got good suck.
And hopefully if she puts him to the breast every three or four hours
And increases what she drinks
Her breastmilk supplies will catch up with his need.

The mortality rate in the neonatal unit is around 20 percent.
Main pathologies are sepsis, asphyxia
and malnutrition.

Unfortunately here in our neonatal unit
we have quite a high mortality rate.
There’s a lot of contributing factors to this.
One of the main factors is that there is actually
no other facility in the area for people to go.
We take very extreme low birthweight babies and extremely premature babies.

The other major problem that we have here
is that the babies that come from outside
they don’t just come from down the street
they come from hours away
and they’ve already only brought them in because they were very sick.
So by the time they reach our emergency department
and then subsequently our unit
these babies are in very poor condition.

In 2018, our teams provided 27,000 emergency consultations at Al Salam hospital and admitted around 1,000 babies to the neonatal unit.