Helping Babies Breathe: Improving Neonatal Resuscitation and Global Neonatal Mortality

Significant progress has been made in reducing global child mortality rates over the past 2 decades, with the improvements in survival primarily occurring among children between 1 month and 5 years of age. As a result, neonatal mortality now accounts for almost half of all deaths in children less than 5 years of age. Helping Babies Breathe is a neonatal resuscitation program developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics for use in low-resource settings and aims to teach basic resuscitation skills to providers who are present at deliveries. Using a train-the-trainer curricular model and low-cost simulator and equipment, Helping Babies Breathe has been implemented in more than 80 countries to train 500 000 providers and has resulted in a marked decline in early neonatal deaths and fresh stillbirths. Ongoing research is being done to optimize strategies to maintain resuscitation skills and knowledge over time, as well as to develop additional methods to improve neonatal resuscitation in low-resource settings, with hopes of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for neonatal mortality rates by 2030 worldwide.