Dr. Joshua Bress is live in Uganda, connecting with healthcare professionals using NoviGuide to improve neonatal and pediatric care. In this post, he shares firsthand insights on how new clinics are selected, champions are found to lead the charge, and how nurses embrace this life-saving tool.
Greetings from Uganda!
I’m traveling from Kampala to Kamuli District Hospital with Dr. Margaret Nakakeeto, a leading Ugandan neonatologist and Global Strategies partner. With us are Mr. Henry Waliggo, a Ugandan technical officer on the NoviGuide Uganda program, and Dr. Givano Kashemwa, our program manager from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four people, three countries, one shared mission: helping nurses and doctors save newborn lives.
In Uganda, 1 in every 45 babies dies before reaching 28 days of life. Multiply that by 1.4 million births a year, and the numbers quickly feel too large to hold. Even walking into a single hospital ward can be overwhelming—the needs of just one unit are immense. But Dr. Nakakeeto has always believed that national progress is built from local action. One puzzle piece, one baby at a time.
As we leave the main road for a narrow dirt track cutting through villages, she turns to me and says, “Let’s pull up Kamuli Hospital.” I tether my phone to my laptop, open the NoviGuide dashboard, and we begin scrolling through the data.
Since August 2024, nurses at Kamuli have used NoviGuide—our clinical decision support tool for newborn care—1,409 times. Focusing just on initial assessments after birth, the number translates to about 570 babies. Only six of those were categorized as “well.” The rest were sick or carried risk factors like low birth weight. The dashboard shows antibiotic inventory gaps. The data tells a clear story: this site is using NoviGuide to care for high-risk, sick babies—the very ones who often become part of national mortality statistics.
Could it also be used more proactively to screen well-appearing newborns who may still be at risk? We make a note to ask.
Kamuli’s neonatal unit is clean, airy, and sunlit. Inside, we meet babies recovering from preterm birth, infection, jaundice—some snuggled beside mothers in kangaroo wraps. Dr. Nakakeeto leads the conversation, asking the nurses how NoviGuide fits into their daily work. They speak openly—about how it’s helped build confidence, how it improves the care they give. But they also name real challenges: power outages, no glucometer for measuring glucose. We explore the app together, showing them the “Rounding” section for managing preterm feeding. They light up and suggest renaming it “Rounding + Feeding.” Dr. Nakakeeto smiles. “They’ll do it,” she says.
That evening, as the sun sets near the source of the Nile, we sit together over dinner and open the dashboard again—this time for all 72 sites across Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In June alone NoviGuide was used 24,038 times. We brainstorm ways to deepen its use: a generic login for rotating nursing students, new features for early risk identification.
The next morning, over coffee, we check the dashboard again. More cases. More babies. Nurses working the night shift, reaching for NoviGuide while we slept. Dr. Nakakeeto glances at the screen one last time before we go. On our way, we stop in Jinja to visit the source of the Nile—an outlet of Lake Victoria, quiet at first, then moving, beginning to flow.
It’s been an amazing visit. Looking forward to more soon.
Warm regards,
Josh
