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Global Newborn Health Conference 2013

Accelerating the Scale-Up of Maternal and Newborn Health Interventions to Reduce Mortality

15 - 18 April, 2013
Birchwood Hotel & OR Tambo Conference Centre
Johannesburg, South Africa

As countries make their final push toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals and beyond, progress in reducing neonatal mortality is essential to meeting the child survival MDG. While progress has been made in addressing childhood illnesses, newborn deaths now account for 43 percent of deaths of children under age 5. Globally, nearly 3 million newborns die each year and 2.6 million babies are stillborn. Four out of five newborn deaths result from three preventable and treatable conditions: prematurity, intrapartum-related complications (“birth asphyxia”) and infections. USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP), Save the Children’s Saving Newborn Lives (SNL) program, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), with additional support from John Snow, Inc., the Laerdal Foundation, and Jhpiego, will host a four-day conference focused on accelerating the scale-up of high-impact interventions that address these three major causes of newborn mortality. 

The target audience for this conference includes Ministry of Health policymakers and program managers, professional associations (in particular pediatric, obstetric and midwifery associations), NGOs engaged in maternal and newborn health (MNH) at national level, UN agencies, USAID missions and USAID-funded bilateral projects as well as other donor-funded national MNH projects. The Global Newborn Health Conference 2013 will:

• Review progress of newborn survival and health programming over the past decade, including updates on global initiatives such as Every Woman Every Child and the Child Survival Call to Action and will lay out the Global Newborn Action Plan.
• Provide technical updates on
  a) evidence-based newborn health interventions across the household to hospital continuum that address the three major newborn killers,
  b) updated global guidelines for specific interventions, such as newborn resuscitation and postnatal care, and
  c) linkages with select maternal and child health, nutrition and family planning and related interventions.
• Share in-country experiences in scaling-up newborn health interventions, including health system strengthening issues, such as partnership coordination, human resources, training, quality of care, logistics, supervision, pay for performance, community health workers and monitoring and evaluation.
• Discuss research priorities for newborn health and promising new technologies and innovative tools that would support newborn health programming at scale.

Successful outcomes of the conference would include:

• Commitment by attendees to accelerate action on newborn programming in their countries.
• Candid sharing of challenges in introducing or scaling-up specific newborn interventions and how these were/were not addressed.
• South-to-south networking to share lessons learned and best practices.
• Mobilization of broad ownership and support for the draft Global Newborn Action Plan.

If you have questions about participation in the Global Newborn Health Conference 2013, please feel free to contact the conference organizers via the Contact page.

Schedule of Events:

14 April:
Welcome Reception, 19h00 - 21h00

Supplementary Session: Guidance on Implementing Effective Programs to Prevent Pre-Eclampsia and Eclampsia and Anemia to Improve Maternal and Newborn Outcomes: 9h00 - 17h00

15 - 18 April:
Global Newborn Health Conference 2013: Accelerating the Scale-Up of Maternal and Newborn Health Interventions to Reduce Mortality

Important!

Members of the media interested in attending the conference should email Charlene Reynolds at creynolds@jhpiego.net.