The Federal Medical Centre (FMC) Lokoja is located near the confluence of the River Niger and River Benue, with a distinctive weather condition that makes our city one of the hottest in Nigeria during certain periods of the year. We have come to observe that the resulting high environmental temperature makes our neonates to be very susceptible to a periodic neonatal hyperthermia called evening-fever syndrome (EFS). The eradication of neonatal EFS in our centre was one of our first focuses as the Neonatal Concerns Medical Outreach (NCMO) of Professor Hippolite Amadi initialized our capacity expansion programme.

We commenced our collaboration with Prof.H.Amadi in June 2013, making us one of the newest tertiary hospitals to join the rest of CCEFTHI member hospitals that had worked with him to revolutionize our approach to neonatal care in Nigeria. As the Medical Director and the representative of FMC-Lokoja at CCEFTHI, I was challenged with the level of neonatal survival progress that my colleagues from the other hospitals had made by applying Prof. Amadi’s techniques. We have ambitiously adopted five of NCMO’s operational concepts, which have drastically improved our neonatal outcome indices, lowering overall mortality at our centre. Unlike the other Nigerian tertiary hospital applying this programme, we have remained the only hospital that implemented up to five of these concepts at the very take off time.
(1) Our functional incubator capacity has now grown from only two units to seven as we continue in our effort to expand this further.
(2) We operate one set of power-banking system that supports uninterrupted functioning of all our seven incubators and two resuscitaires.
(3) All our incubators have been fitted with the BM02 apnoea monitoring system, playing incredible guard against sudden infant death syndrome.
(4) From the inception of this consultancy, we introduced the “nursery double-wall” technique upgrading our present temporary SCBU against climate-induced neonatal EFS.

We are currently about to complete our purpose-built SCBU complex based on the design elements and factors analysed in the EFS eradication study published by Amadi et al 2014. By our projected end of completion of the new SCBU, we are hoping to be the first Nigerian tertiary centre to implement Prof Amadi’s proposal of “F7D isolation unit” for lowering high early neonatal deaths in Nigerian SCBUs. Please watch this space for our soonto-be-told big neonatal story. (5) We adopted the idea of failure-preventive-culture (FAC) from the onset and do not intend to break this as we progress to nurture the best and largest neonatal referral centre within the northwest middle belt of Nigeria.