By Gabriel Oshokha
Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies (NEST360) Alliance on Thursday commissioned Kangaroo Mother Care rooms at Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital and Oni Memorial Children’s Hospital in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
The new KMC rooms will improve the environment for mothers caring for small and sick newborns, highlighting the need to invest in quality newborn care across Nigeria.
Speaking at the event, Country Lead, NEST360 Nigeria, Prof. Chinyere Ezeaka, described KMC as a high-impact intervention that saves lives.
“KMC involves holding a baby against a parent’s bare chest, providing skin-to-skin contact alongside support for breastfeeding and appropriate clinical care,” she said.
The Professor of Paediatrics and Neonatology disclosed that before the establishment of the rooms, mothers at Oni Memorial Children’s Hospital and Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital were practising KMC within the neonatal wards.
“The hospitals lacked dedicated spaces for this essential practice. Limited space posed practical challenges, and mothers were concerned about their privacy whenever visitors entered the wards. For a mother whose baby is small or unwell, the hospital experience can already be overwhelming,” Ezeaka said.
She stated that although the launch of the KMC rooms addressed a critical gap in the hospitals, the scale of Nigeria’s newborn survival challenge calls for a need to look beyond individual hospitals.
“These rooms offer mothers a more suitable, private space to practise KMC, stay close to their babies, and participate in their care with the support of health professionals,” Ezeaka said.
“Across the country, more hospitals need newborn units that are appropriately designed to care for small and sick babies. They need dedicated spaces for KMC, reliable essential services, functioning medical equipment, and the resources to maintain these resources,” she added.
NEST360, a project delivered by APIN Public Health Initiatives, is an international alliance in 23 countries, with 17 in Africa, working with governments to take care of small and sick newborns.
Speaking further, Ezeaka said: “We take care of small and sick newborns — the babies who are born too soon — the pre-term are the babies who are very small and are less than 2.5kg. They form a very vulnerable group and one of their major problems is warmth. When they are born, they come out of the womb so early. They remain cold and they die earlier leading to complications.
“So Kangaroo Mother Care is a well-recognised evidence-based standard of care to keep these babies skin-to-skin next to their mothers for warmth, breast milk and brain development. And then the heartbeat and respiratory of the mother stimulate those babies so that they can continue to breathe. And so it has been found that infections are reduced when these babies are doing Kangaroo Mother Care and also that their brain development is more. They are discharged early and gain weight faster. So this is what prompted the NEST360 programme,” she said.
Ezeaka added: “We are also looking at some key infrastructure like the solar system we installed at UCH, Adeoyo, Oni Memorial Children’s Hospital. So we’re launching two rooms — one at Oni Memorial and one at Adeoyo Maternity. These rooms are equipped with reclining beds for the mothers for KMC. We also have reclining chairs, we provided refrigerators for the mothers where they can put their breast milk for their babies, and so forth. We made the room conducive.”
Ezeaka stated that NEST360 is also training staff on how to take care of KMC, and that the KMC rooms would not only be extended to other hospitals in the state, but across Nigeria.
“So Kangaroo Mother Care is key. We are proposing that other hospitals in Oyo State will benefit from Kangaroo Mother Care rooms, and not just Oyo State but all over the country. So Kangaroo Mother Care is standard of care for every small baby and every pre-term baby — all in the quest to reduce neonatal morbidity and mortality which Nigeria has very high numbers of. We are now almost second in the world, and first in the whole of Africa. The numbers are enormous when we are looking at 41 deaths per 1,000 live births. For us as a country, we need to look at these life-saving interventions for neonates,” she said.
According to Ezeaka, Nigeria loses an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 newborns every year.
“Nigeria loses an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 newborns every year. That is about 700 babies every day or 29 every hour. Every newborn deserves a chance to survive and thrive. Yet, for too many families across Nigeria, the first days of a baby’s life are marked by uncertainty, fear, and loss,” she said.
She appreciated the Nigerian government, the Oyo State Ministry of Health, the leadership and staff of Oni Memorial Children’s Hospital, Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital, and all other partners that contributed to the project.
Ezeaka advocated health insurance for small babies, saying that the out-of-pocket payment that parents and families have to bear for babies to be seen in hospitals is enormous.
“So many mothers and babies are not able to access all this care that is available in the hospitals. And we are not just talking about newborn deaths but maternal deaths because for one mother that dies, there are seven newborns. So one major area that we must prioritise is health insurance for every newborn, for every mother in the remotest areas where they are,” she said.
In her address, the Commissioner for Health, Dr Oluwaserimi Ajetunmobi, lauded the medical intervention aimed at preventing newborn deaths in Oyo State.
The commissioner stated that the dedicated rooms would help mothers to provide warmth and essential care for premature babies after they had received initial treatment in special care baby units.
“When we are talking about taking care of newborns, one of the things we need to monitor and support them with is warmth, and that is where Kangaroo Mother Care comes in.
“Now that we have these rooms, particularly at one of the children’s hospitals in the state, it is very impressive. When babies are born prematurely or with low birth weight, taking care of them becomes easier because they can move from the special care baby unit to the Kangaroo Mother Care room, where mothers can have skin-to-skin contact with them,” the commissioner said.
According to her, the intervention would also support breastfeeding, which she said is essential to children’s development during the first 1,000 days of life.
She added that the state would assess the impact of the facilities before replicating the intervention in other hospitals in the state.
Speaking with journalists shortly after the event, NEST360 Country Director, Dr Opeyemi Odedere, stated that the facilities were established through synergy with the Oyo State Ministry of Health for the past six years.
“The rooms are models for other hospitals,” he said, expressing the hope that the Oyo State government would replicate the intervention across its healthcare facilities.
Additionally, Odedere stated that NEST360 had been providing capacity-building programmes for biomedical engineers, doctors and nurses, in addition to training in equipment maintenance and quality improvement.
Odedere revealed that NEST360 was implementing similar interventions in Lagos, Kaduna, Kano and the Federal Capital Territory, and giving support to the Federal Ministry of Health in policy development.
Also speaking, the Chairman of the Oyo State Hospitals Management Board, Hon. Adekunle Bankole, said there is an enabling environment for partnerships with organisations such as NEST360 for strengthening healthcare delivery.
Bankole assured of proper maintenance of the facilities, saying that the government was committed to extending similar interventions to other hospitals across the state.
In his speech, the Head of Oni Memorial Children’s Hospital, Dr Salami Ayodeji, appreciated NEST360 for renovating the hospital’s Kangaroo Mother Care room.
“We assure NEST360 that this facility will be properly maintained and put to effective use to improve newborn care and outcomes.
“On behalf of the management and staff, I sincerely thank NEST360 for this valuable intervention. This facility will provide a more comfortable environment for mothers to care for their babies, particularly those born prematurely or with low birth weight,” Ayodeji said.
Present at the event were the Permanent Secretary, Oyo State Hospitals Management Board, Dr (Mrs) Anifat Boladele Ibraheem; Permanent Secretary, State Ministry of Health, Dr Ayinde Akintunde; Director, Non-communicable Diseases and New Business Development, APIN Public Health Initiatives, Dr Olubanjo Ogunsola; Head of Office, APIN, Oyo State, Dr Folake Adurogbola; NEST360 global team, among other healthcare professionals.
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