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Research Article: Trends in Neonatal Mortality at Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital, Accra, and the Newborn Strategic Plan: Implications for Reducing Mortality in Hospital and the Community

Date Published: 2023-10-29

Abstract:
Background: In low and middle-income countries, close to half of the mortality in children under the age of five years occurs in neonates. Objectives: We examined the trend, medical conditions and factors associated with newborn deaths at the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital (PML), Accra, from 2014 to 2017 (4 years). Methods: The study was a cross-sectional study. Data on age, sex, date of admission, date of discharge, cause of death and place of residence of these babies were obtained from the records department. This was transferred into an Access database and analyzed. Components of the Newborn Strategic Plan implemented at the hospital were described. Results: Neonatal sepsis, pneumonia and kernicterus were the major causes of death. Admissions increased and 5.4% of the neonates died, declining from 6.5% in 2014 to 4.2% in 2017 due to deliberate actions to reduce neonatal death. The highest mortality occurred in babies residing in an area more than 1 hour’s drive away from the hospital. Conclusion: Implementing the Newborn Strategic Plan was associated with a drop in mortality. A preponderance of community-acquired infections was observed. Thus, locality-specific interventions targeted at known determinants and implementing the newborn strategic plan are essential for reducing neonatal mortality.

Introduction:
Although reducing neonatal deaths has been a matter of major public health concern for the past two decades, and neonatal death rates have slowly declined. Currently, neonatal deaths constitute almost half, 47%, of the deaths in children under the age of 5 years [1,2,3,4]. Back in 2015, newborn deaths were reported to constitute 45% of all deaths in children under the age of five years and this was projected to rise to 52% by 2030 [5]. In 2019, 2.4 million children died globally in their first month of life with…

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