At Zomba Central Hospital, a community hospital in Malawi, there is not a single doctor on staff. While they visit weekly, a majority of the care daily is performed by nurses, health care workers, and in the case of newborn intensive care unit, mothers. In 2016, I travelled to Malawi with the Neotree charity, a NGO formed at University College London, focused on developing an algorithm based mHealth application to assist nurses to provide the best care. The app aims to provide training and relevant guidelines in line with the Ministry of Health in Malawi, ensuring that the app can function successfully without direct foreign assistance.
Millions of babies die in Africa a year and many of the deaths do not ever get recorded.* At this moment, neonatal death rates in much of Africa are similar to those in England a century ago.* It is essential to count every newborn, even those that do not survive, so that it is not another century before babies born in Africa have the same chance at life as those born in Europe. Neotree hopes to be apart of the solution. The charity currently operates in Malawi and Zimbabwe and hopes to expand. In 2021, I worked to create a new version of the documentary with new voiceover footage from Zimbabwe. To view the new documentaryclick here