National Maternal and Neonatal Health Event in Dominican Republic to Feature USAID/BASICS
March 17—Dr. Nieves Rodriguez, USAID/BASICS Coordinator in the Dominican Republic, has been invited by UNICEF to present the project's accomplishments at a national event planned on April 1 in Santo Domingo to launch the 2009 edition of The State of the World's Children. This annual UNICEF publication examines the current state of maternal and neonatal health, explores the fundamentals of a supportive environment for mothers and newborns, and outlines ways to strengthen efforts in support of primary health care.
USAID/BASICS' program in the Dominican Republic is part of a USAID initiative to improve newborn health in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. As a partner in the Interagency Working Group—which includes USAID's LAC Bureau, the Pan American Health Organization, CORE, ACCESS, Saving Newborn Lives and UNICEF—USAID/BASICS is working to foster consensus among countries in the region on essential actions for newborn health through the establishment of a regional strategy.
With country partners, USAID/BASICS is operationalizing one important element of the LAC regional strategy: prevention and treatment of neonatal sepsis. This is being achieved through distance learning methodologies and elements of collaborative models for quality improvement. In the Dominican Republic, as well as in El Salvador, this effort focuses on the prevention and treatment of neonatal sepsis at the hospital level. Honduras is implementing the same intervention at the community level.