Hope abounds as Belmont University collaborates with global partners at Bangalore Baptist Hospital to save lives at birth in India. Funded by a $40,000 grant from the Laerdal Foundation, the program will engage nursing students enrolled in nursing schools throughout India.
This project aims to provide novel culturally responsive curricula incorporating best practices in labor and delivery, newborn assessment, essential newborn care and life saving measures.
The World Health Organization identified India as having the poorest inequity score for newborn health interventions among all countries in the Southeast Asia Region. While infant mortality has improved in India over the last two decades, it still leads the world in the number of newborn deaths each year. According to the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, India also has the highest rate of stillbirths with 32.2 stillbirths per 1000 total births per year, 23 times higher than the country with the lowest stillbirth rate in the world.
Project investigators from Belmont University and Bangalore Baptist Hospital’s Institute of Nursing will design, implement and research innovative teaching and learning strategies in simulation, mobile health, virtual reality simulation and e-learning to combat this health disparity. Belmont and Bangalore Baptist Hospital will also partner with INACSL’s first Regional Interest Group in India to analyze outcomes from the project
This project exemplifies Belmont’s Aspirational Aims to equip people to solve the world’s complex problems through teaching, research and service; and to be radical champions for helping people and communities flourish.
