ResusRight & Newborn Resuscitation Training

Over 8% of babies born around the world every year require someone to help them take their first breath.

That is a staggering amount, around 10 million babies annually, but the number of people that resuscitation impacts are far greater — whether it’s the immediate family, their friends or the healthcare workers.

Whether midwife, scrub nurse or neonatologist, there are numerous healthcare workers involved in ensuring that a newborn has the absolute best care possible and when a resuscitation scenario arises they have to be ready. The first minute of life is absolutely critical, termed ‘the Golden Minute’ by the American Academy of Paediatrics, and if the baby isn’t breathing, manual inflation of their lungs is an incredibly important part of that.

Like any skill, manual ventilation for newborn resuscitation needs to be practised. Healthcare workers who are regularly involved in resuscitation need regular training, with most requiring annual accreditation by their employer. However, 62% of surveyed healthcare workers found that this training was both inadequate and infrequent, and said that they lacked confidence in providing manual ventilation to newborns.

Babies come in different shapes and sizes and as a result, they each have different needs. Concerning manual ventilation, one of the most important and most variable needs is the amount of air being delivered to their lungs. A small baby needs a small amount of air and a large baby needs a large amount of air. Too much air and the babies lungs can be damaged, leading to further issues/complications. Conversely, too little air and the baby could suffer brain damage or even die. Yet this concept isn’t taught during most newborn resuscitation training, people are only taught to watch the babies chest rise and fall with the ventilation as there is no clinically viable way to quantifiably see how much air is being delivered.

This all needs to change.

Our team at ResusRight is working to improve this through the development of our Resuscitation Training Monitor (RTM). Clinical research has found that the use of a respiratory function monitor during resuscitation training improves not only the quality of the immediate resuscitation but that of further resuscitations once the monitor has been removed. These monitors are traditionally large, expensive and complex, with a variety of cables, cords and tubes, they also have to be mounted off to the side — outside the users’ field of view. The ResusRight RTM fixes all these issues — providing an easy to interpret and intuitive to use device that provides the user with quantitative data.

This allows users to adjust, optimize and improve their technique during training so that they are better equipped for action in the ‘golden minute’.