Dr. Abhay Bang has achieved a dramatic decrease in infant mortality rate by empowering local women with the knowledge they need to take care of babies
How did you come up with the Home Based Newborn Care model?
When we came to Gadchiroli [in 1984], soon after it was carved out as a new district, there was just one district hospital. To say that a baby needs to travel 300 kilometres for a hospital each day is to say let [it] die. The infant mortality rate was 120/1,000 live births. There was a sense of fatalism among parents. So we started teaching village women to treat newborn babies. Even now, 21 lakh children die before five and of them 11 lakh die in the first week. Neonatal mortality is also the most resistant to come down. So we decided to train literate village women. That was the hardest part — moving newborn care from hospital to home. We found that the major reasons for neonatal deaths were asphyxia, preterm births, infections and other reasons.
Was it hard to teach these women to administer injections?
For Sepsis, which was a major killer among newborns, we taught the women to identify seven major symptoms and said that if any two were there a diagnosis of Sepsis was made. It was an ethical and moral dilemma to teach these women to give Gentamycin injections to treat Sepsis. But once these symptoms become clear a baby can die within two days.