LATEST REPORT on the reduction of NEONATAL MORTALITY in Nigeria by the committee of CMDs/MDs of tertiary hospitals

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The Committee of Chief Executives of Federal Tertiary Health Institutions of Nigeria (CCEFTHI) is the umbrella organisation of the heads of Nigerian federal government owned specialist/teaching hospitals. As the Chairman of CCEFTHI, I write to confirm the corporate involvement of our organisation in this nationwide neonatal survival campaign.

I have known this programme for nearly ten years. It is usually rare to come across such professionals as Dr Amadi with unquestionable compassion to save the Nigerian neonate. My colleagues from member hospitals of CCEFTHI would report on how Dr Amadi defies all odds of transport, harsh weather, civil-unrests and all kinds of dangers to maintain many years of unbroken neonatal consultancies at the various hospitals, across the entire landscape of the country.

In July 2007, after reports of various trial successes, at the 58th general meeting held at UBTH Benin-city, the CCEFTHI moved a motion of confidence on the contributions of Dr Amadi towards national development on healthcare. In the resolution, member hospitals of CCEFTHI were individually encouraged to collaborate with Dr Amadi’s research efforts in developing affordable procedures and low-cost technologies that could address the problems of high facility-based neonatal mortality rate in our Special-care baby units (SCBUs). I am aware that following this resolution, many tertiary hospitals across the country, including University of Abuja Teaching Hospital (UATH) where I also serve as the Chief Medical Director, engaged with Dr Amadi and his team as they tried and tested many ideas and innovations in our hospitals. The various participating hospitals formally engaged Dr Amadi as visiting consultant to their institutions. This position enabled him to monitor the progress of his installed systems and jointly measure outcomes with our local paediatricians. Prior to this, most of our Nigerian hospitals could not sustain a consistent availability of up to three functional incubators to manage the teaming population of neonatal admissions – leading to very high early death of neonates including extremely-preterm, which rarely survived. Today, UATH for example, just like the majority of the participated hospitals, have consistently operated with over 10 functional incubators for as many years as Dr Amadi’s recycled-incubator-technology program has been applied. The CMD of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) reported – in December 2013 – that LUTH had been able to apply Dr Amadi’s techniques to reach incubator capacity of 38 functional systems from a very poor condition of non-availability of any functional incubator as at January 2007. Dr Amadi has implemented up to eight different revolutionary ideas in our hospitals, each contributing towards continuous reduction of our center-based neonatal mortality rates. Some of these have been reported in a Journal publication.

On the 3rd of December 2013, I chaired the general assembly of the CCEFTHI when the progress of this collaboration was reviewed. Up to ten CMDs and medical directors (MDs) of the participating hospitals presented their reports. Each of these was almost similar to the other in terms of high achievements of the various aspects of the program the hospitals adopted. Many improvements of neonatal outcome indices were reported by participating member hospitals. At UATH, for example, neonatal mortality rate has dropped to 89/’000 presentations based on our 2014 analyses as compared to our 2009 assessments that put this at 214/’000 presentations. The CCEFTHI will continue to support this effort and hence call on anyone or organisation who would like to save the Nigerian neonate to join us.