Rescue service training in Albania

Together with two partner organizations, the AGNF worked in Albania from October 2012 to February 2013 to improve the survival rate of premature and newborn babies. Both the Swiss Foundation for Innovation and Nehemiah Gateway are primarily involved in the support and development of educational and medical care facilities.

According to the UN, 15 babies out of 1,000 newborns died in Albania in 2012. The reason for this is that premature babies can only be treated by the emergency services far too late or often not at all. Premature babies and newborns have to be transferred from smaller hospitals to larger hospitals or the country’s only specialist clinic in Tirana under the most basic and very unfavorable conditions. The lack of special vehicles for transporting such “premature babies” and a lack of staff training repeatedly led to deaths that could have been avoided under more favorable conditions.

With our project, we tried to improve this situation by expanding the rescue service in Albania together with our Albanian partner organizations and developing an action-oriented curriculum for the standardized training of rescue service personnel. It was particularly important for us to train the local staff specifically for the special conditions in the country, with the care of premature babies with an ambulance explicitly equipped for this purpose being the focus of this training.