Jan is running the London Marathon 2024 for Neotree - a charity aiming to save the lives of babies in Africa.

PROBLEM

● More than 6500 babies, in their first month of life, will die today

● A baby born in the Africa region today is 10 times more likely to die than one born in Europe or North America

● 70% deaths in low income countries are from preventable conditions (more than 1.2m babies each year)

Neotree empowers doctors and nurses to provide high quality and consistent care to improve those babies’ chances of surviving and thriving.

SOLUTION:

Sometimes radical advances can be achieved with simple solutions.

The Neotree app is used by healthcare workers at the bedside, as they provide care to newborns. It guides

the healthcare workers to perform the correct checks, in the right order. It prompts them to record the data, and uses that data to support them make the correct diagnosis and quickly take the appropriate remedial action. The data is then available at a hospital and national level to guide hospital managers and national policymakers to allocate resources, identify health issues and take systematic steps to address them.

EVIDENCE:

Early data from Chinhoyi Provincial Hospital, Zimbabwe, show case fatality rates in vulnerable babies dropped by 50% after Neotree was introduced. Clinicians in Malawi have told us Neotree is “part and parcel of our day-to-day work” which “forces a thorough assessment of the baby”, and “helps us to see where we aren’t doing well”. Health care workers have reported high-perceived improvements in quality of newborn care after using Neotree on the ward. Evaluation has shown Neotree to be a highly usable, acceptable, feasible tool that has resulted in both perceived, and observed, improvements in newborn care, such as optimised prescription of antibiotics and reduced rates of hypothermia (unpublished). The turn-around time of blood culture results has been reduced from 5 days to under 48 hours using the Neotree platform, improving antimicrobial stewardship and infection control. It has proven resilient through industrial strikes and a global pandemic.

To learn more visit: https://neotree.org/