Centering and humanising health systems: empowerment through Kangaroo Mother Care

Abstract

Women often are marginalised in the care of their infants, as global health programmes tend to neglect the innate abilities women possess to enable their babies to survive and thrive. We report on the profoundly empowering experience that one of us (MW) had in providing skin-to-skin care for a preterm newborn infant in the context of programmatic efforts to transform Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) pro- vision in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India [1]. The Government of UP has recognised the scientific evidence and powerful humanity inherent in this practice and has constructed KMC units throughout the state with lounges designed to provide empathetic spaces in which women are dignified and rightfully recognised as possessing the ability to save newborn lives. These lounges manifest the realisation that acknowledging and unleashing human nature transforms lives. KMC has risen to the forefront of recommended interventions to decrease neonatal mortality [2-4]. However, global uptake has been low and slow [5], neonatal deaths make up nearly half of all under-5 mortality [6], and women still do not feel empowered to take the care of themselves and their babies into their own hands. With global data now clearly indicating that KMC reduces risk of mortality of newborn infants who are under 2000 g at birth [7], there is a gaping divide between what research supports and what hospitals, governments, and societies enable women to do. In the decades of effort to decrease neonatal mortality, women have typically been circumvented in an attempt to reach the newborn with technological interventions.