Achieving High Quality and Respectful Care for Mothers and Newborns, by Supporting Enhancements and Scale-Up of the Kangaroo Lounge Ecosystem

Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a powerful low-cost innovation that can avert 450,000 preterm deaths globally with near universal coverage, besides long-term health and socioeconomic benefits for all recipients.Our innovation – The Kangaroo Lounge Ecosystem – is a scalable model that integrates multiple systemic components critical for ensuring high coverage of high-quality & respectful KMC within a large, imperfect health system. It addresses known bottlenecks to KMC implementation, strengthens the health system, and achieved ~90% coverage of KMC across 11 facilities in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, during the proof-of-concept phase over a 1 year evaluation period. We have partnered with the UP government to establish necessary infrastructure and human resources for our model in 170 secondary-level health facilities. Our goal for this TTS period is to implement our model across these 170 facilities (est. delivery load of ~480,000 births i.e. ~140,000 low birth weight infants per annum) and achieve high KMC coverage with quality. This is critical to meeting our ultimate goal – ensuring that each of the 1.7 million low birth weight infants in UP receives high quality KMC by 2025.