Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-1-2025
Abstract
South Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries, disproportionately overrepresented in the World Bank's low- and middle-income categories, bear a high burden of small and/or sick newborns. It is important to acknowledge that, in addition to reducing mortality, creating opportunities to enhance their health and well-being, thereby improving quality of life, is an essential metric for evaluating neonatal care success. With increased survival rates for small and/or sick newborns in most high-burden, resource-constrained settings, developing and strengthening specialized, structured neonatal follow-up programs to provide high-quality post-hospital care is imperative for optimizing outcomes and quality of life. This paper proposes a Systems Framework for Neonatal Follow-Up of small and/or sick newborns. While this framework applies to all settings, it is particularly pertinent in low-resource, high-burden countries, considering their unique contextual settings. This framework will provide a significant opportunity to foster meaningful engagement and partnership with a wide range of relevant local stakeholders, including families with small and/or sick newborns, as well as to identify areas for increased strategic investment. Furthermore, a multidimensional checklist aligned with the proposed framework provides a comprehensive tool for assessing neonatal follow-up readiness in health systems. The goal is to accelerate progress by transforming the delivery and accessibility of neonatal follow-up for small and/or sick newborns, thus improving the prospects for favorable long-term outcomes in this highly vulnerable population.
Keywords
global health, high-risk infant, low birth weight, neonatal follow-up, neurodevelopment, preterm birth, small vulnerable newborns
Language
English
Publication Title
Seminars in Perinatology
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial copying and redistribution of the material in any medium or format, provided the original work is not changed in any way and is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Bora, Samudragupta, "Systems Framework for Post-Hospital Follow-up Care of Small and/or Sick Newborns: A Pathway to Sustainable and Scalable Quality Care in Low-Resource, High-Burden Countries" (2025). Faculty Scholarship. 1544.
https://commons.case.edu/facultyworks/1544
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version