Improving newborn survival

The implementation of Comprehensive Newborn Care Package (CNCP) in Kushtia district has been recently launched in Dhaka by the Directorates of Health Services (DGHS) and Directorates of Family Planning (DGFP) with technical support from Saving Newborn Lives Programme of Save the Children in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh government adopted evidence-based, newborn death-cause-specific four new newborn interventions for national scale-up in July 2013. The Government of Bangladesh also declared its commitment to ending preventable child deaths in the country by 2035 in the declaration on 'Ending Preventable Child Deaths by 2035: Bangladesh Call for Action'. This declaration categorically included essential newborn care, new newborn health interventions and specialised newborn care and district and sub-district level as the strategy to reduce newborn mortality.

Against this backdrop, the DGHS and DGFP developed CNCP with technical support from SNL, Save the Children incorporating healthy newborn care (like immediate and essential newborn care including Chlorhexidine use, postnatal care), sick newborn care or care for newborn complications (birth asphyxia management, sepsis management, KMC and judicial use of antenatal corticosteroid) and Comprehensive Social Behavioural Change Communication for promoting Healthy maternal newborn health behaviour and proper care seeking for newborns.

This package will be implemented in Kushtia with technical support from SNL, Save the Children in Bangladesh to measure the strength of implementation so that those interventions could be implemented at scale within the existing government system later on.