Nurturing Care for Sick and Small Newborns: Testing a New Cadre of Expert Mother Workers to Improve Care and Child Outcomes

Evrard Nahimana of Partners in Health in Rwanda will test the delivery of a peer-support model using Expert Mothers for the provision of nurturing care to small and sick newborns in 2 district hospitals in Rwanda through a quasi-experimental pre-post design. Efforts to reduce neonatal mortality have included the expansion of care for small and sick newborns, which has the potential to save 1.9 million newborn lives. However, less attention has been paid to increases in developmental disability that occur as children survive the neonatal period with significant morbidity.