Lisa Clark, a nurse practitioner at Stony Brook Long Island Children’s Hospital, had planned to be in Khartoum, Sudan this past October to train nurses and midwives on how to provide life-saving care to newborns who were not breathing. Her purpose was to emphasize the importance of paying attention to a baby’s breathing in the vital first minute, but her time-sensitive mission was held up for months by bureaucratic red tape that tied up her funding and her visa application.
“We had to cancel and reschedule our classes for January,” Clark said. “It took a lot of effort from the federal minister of health and the local minister of health to persuade or educate them on the purpose of the help we were bringing.”
Clark made the transatlantic journey limping along on a knee that she said probably needs replacement. She dealt with the pain and the conditions of a war-torn, third world country because, she said, she has “a passion for global health.” But just getting there was problematic.
Once her U.S.-based funding went through, she was again tangled up with the European Union’s embargo on Sudan. Much of the money for the project came from Irish Aid and University College Cork. At the last minute, she said, she realized the budget was too small and wrote her own grant.
“We couldn’t get the money through until every penny could be proven to account for medical equipment or transportation,” Clark said. “When we do these embargoes, we hurt the country, and we hurt the people.”
A mere $30 of equipment, she said, is enough to save the lives in isolated villages.
UNICEF lists infant mortality in Sudan occurs at a rate of 81 deaths per 1,000 live births. In addition, there is a maternal mortality during childbirth after one percent of pregnancies. According to Clark, reducing infant mortality brings down additional pregnancies and decreases the chance of a mother’s death.
According to a university press release, the Helping Babies Breathe program teaches midwives to “look to the baby’s breathing in the first critical moments of life,” which is known as the Golden Minute.
“They understand how to deliver a baby, they’ve been doing this for years,” Clark said. “We train them to give the first minute to the baby, which will give the baby a chance, then go back to the mom.”
Clark, along with Sudanese doctor Abdel Moniem Mohamed Hamid and Salah Ibrahim, ran a four-day course with the goal of training a dedicated group who would in turn train future classes.
“We used the first class to train the second,” Clark explained. “And I’ve been grading the second class, all women with no college education. The lowest grades were a 71 and a 77, and the rest were all 80 or above. I couldn’t believe how well it went.”
She said the results were encouraging and that the goal of creating a sustainable education program seemed to have been met, but she plans to return next year to monitor progress.
“I am not the kind of person to just drop in,” she said. “When I start something, I see it through.”
Even so, she is looking for more projects. When told that during the same weeks she was in Sudan, another group from Stony Brook went to neighboring Kenya in this winter’s Journalism Without Walls trip, she immediately asked about the SBU-built maternity clinic in the area. She is also looking at bringing Helping Babies Breathe to Uganda with the university’s Dr. Traci Downs.
“These people are out there in communities with nothing,” Clark said. “We empower them to help themselves.”
