Supporting Child Caregivers’ collaborator in North India is the Christian Hospital of Kasganj [CHK] located in the city of Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh—one of India’s most rural states. In 2018, Uttar Pradesh's infant mortality rate was 4.3% which is the third-highest of any Indian state, and far higher than the national average infant mortality rate for India (2.83%). The Christian Hospital of Kasganj does the important work of being the only quality neonatal care facility for the 2,000,000 people that live around it. Mothers, babies, and caregivers of children in this region face challenges such as abject poverty, malnutrition, lack of clean drinking water, poor access to neonatal care. Furthermore, Uttar Pradesh is the Indian state with the highest female infanticide rate. 

Supporting Child Caregivers’ relationship with the Christian Hospital of Kasganj dates back decades since this was the hospital where our founder’s aunt did her residency, decades ago. Since 2019, the Christian Hospital of Kasganj has included our Protect-Nurture-Enjoy curriculum into its training for nursing staff. In 2020, the nursing staff of the Christian Hospital of Kasganj comprised the first-ever class to successfully complete the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Infant-Parent Mental Health program. This enabled the nursing staff to provide better care to the mothers and babies they work with.

Since March of 2021, the training of student nurses at Christian Hospital Kasganj (CHK) has been put on hold because of the pandemic. Many of the student nurses have been sent home, most of the hospital staff, students, and residents have been contracted COVID, and the hospital has been struggling to care for patients in the context of critical shortages of oxygen and medication. Whereas our first concern is for the health of our friends at CHK, we also hope to resume the in-person training when the virus is under control.

In addition, we are continuing to work on putting the “Protect, Nurture, and Enjoy” (PNE) training (similar to the Building Baby Brains, BBB, training in Pakistan) online, which will make it more accessible in the future. The PNE/BBB training includes lectures, illustrative videos, and videos of two pregnant Indian women discussing their pregnancies. The dialogues are a method of communicating current scientific information about perinatal health and infant care in an engaging and user-friendly way.
We hope that the cross-fertilization of our Indian and Pakistan projects will make it possible for us to create a course in the nursing school for ASHAs and Aanganwadis—Indian community health workers similar to the lady health workers (LHW) in Pakistan—so that we can bring the training to front-line caregivers. They in turn can bring the information and methods they learn from the Protect, Nurture, Enjoy, and Building Baby Brains trainings to the village parents and infants.

Given the unique nature of the challenges India has faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Supporting Child Caregivers has donated USD2000.00 to Christian Hospital of Kasganj’s COVID relief efforts. We continue to support our Indian collaborator in its time of need and if you would like to donate, please click the button below.