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Our History

Our history

In 2010 Laerdal established the not-for-profit sister company, Laerdal Global Health (LGH), and became a dedicated member of the Helping Babies Breathe Global Development Alliance established by USAID.

Some years before, in 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) invited Laerdal to collaborate on developing a simplified and culturally-adapted course in newborn resuscitation to meet the needs in low-resource settings. Laerdal responded by providing educational design for the course that was to become known as Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) and the low-cost simulator, NeoNatalie, to make the training more engaging and effective. 

Since then, large-scale studies that evaluated HBB programs in Tanzania and Nepal showed a 47% reduction in early 24-hour neonatal mortality and a 24% reduction in fresh stillbirths. This spurred further motivation to bring these innovations to scale.

 

Helping Mothers and Babies Survive

The interest that HBB raised triggered the question: if hundreds of thousands of birth attendants could be reached by this course, would this be an opportunity to also train them to prevent the leading cause of death for mothers, bleeding after birth?

Laerdal teamed up with Jhpiego, collaborating on the development of the birthing simulator MamaNatalie and the Helping Mothers Survive (HMS) training program.

With inclusion of the HMS program, the HBB alliance developed into the Survive & Thrive public-private partnership, including professional associations, the private sector and NGOs. Although the formal partnership ended in 2017, its educational programs are reaching more than 100,000 new birth attendants every year by being embedded in national programs and through initiatives such as 50,000 Happy Birthdays.

Safer Births Bundle of Care

Over a decade of research and development in Tanzania, exploring how healthcare workers could be better equipped to manage emergencies on the day of birth led to the development of the Safer Births Bundle of Care program.

This evidence-based program, which showed remarkable reductions in maternal and newborn deaths in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, includes innovative training and clinical tools, with a focus on continuous quality improvement and strong mentorship. The program uses low-dose, high-frequency training for individuals and teams. Digital tools capture data for reflective debriefing, shifting the culture from “blame and shame” to continuous quality improvement. 

The program has reached over 150 health facilities in Tanzania and over 25 facilities in Nigeria, with both countries continuing to actively scale. It’s approach is also incorporated into programs across Nepal and India, with the Ethiopian government also expressing strong interest in incorporating it into its national maternal and newborn health initiatives. 

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