Millions of children die each year, many from causes that could be prevented, such as diarrhea and pneumonia. At Save the Children, we strive to ensure that no child will die from preventable causes before his or her fifth birthday.

When a disaster strikes, it’s the first minutes, hours and days that matter most. That’s when most lives are lost, when children’s suffering is most intense. In many crisis situations, specialised healthcare is not always available for at-risk pregnant mothers and newborns. Save the Children established our Emergency Health Unit (EHU) in 2015 to provide life-saving healthcare to children in the most difficult and dangerous places. It is a mobile network of health teams across the world, which we deploy to ensure we have the right people, in the right place, ready to act. As of December 2019, the EHU has deployed more than 30 times, reached more than 3 million people, and trained more than 5,000 health workers. In 2019, Save the Children Hong Kong decided to invest in a field hospital that can be deployed as a Mother & Baby Unit by our EHU when hospitals have been destroyed. The field hospital – to be launched in early 2020 – is a game changer. Within 72 hours of a decision to respond to a crisis,the field hospital equipment and medicine can be packed and sent to the affected country. It will enable us to provide a higher level healthcare for children in some of the toughest places around the world. Save the Children Hong Kong provided instrumental support to the new Mother and Baby unit by funding an obstetrician-gynaecologist, critical equipment, as well as a stock of essential medicines. The dedicated Mother and Baby Unit will be a lifesaving intervention where women in emergencies can access comprehensive maternal and newborn healthcare, no matter what the setting.

In 2019, Save the Children continued its efforts to scale up its programme to improve newborn health in China. Through partnering with health authorities and technical experts at various levels, we have largely enhanced the availability and accessibility of cost-effective and evidence-based interventions including Kangaroo Mother Care(KMC) to vulnerable newborns in China. Every year, tens of millions of infants around the world are born underweight or prematurely. These infants are at an increased risk of early growth retardation, developmental delay and even death during infancy and childhood. Evidence suggests that KMC is a simple and cost-effective intervention in which the mother wraps the preterm baby in skin-to-skin contact on her chest. This improves rates of breastfeeding and can lead to improved stability of the heart and breathing rate of the baby, reducing morbidity and mortality in low-birth-weight infants. Save the Children Hong Kong supported the piloting of the National Guideline of KMC and Breastfeeding for Preterm Babies in 2019 to introduce KMC to China. Healthcare workers from pilot hospitals were trained and supported at the national and provincial levels to ensure the quality of the KMC practices. With more than 20 hospitals across the country already piloting the KMC intervention, our programme benefitted 2,259 preterm babies during the year, enhancing their health and development.