AIM To measure progress with the implementation of kangaroo mother care (KMC) for low birth-weight (LBW) infants at a health systems level. DESIGN Action research design, with district and regional hospitals as the unit of analysis. SETTING Four regions in Ghana, identified by the Ghana Health Service and UNICEF. PARTICIPANTS Health workers and officials, health care facilities and distri...

BACKGROUND Scaling up the implementation of new health care interventions can be challenging and demand intensive training or retraining of health workers. This paper reports on the results of testing the effectiveness of two different kinds of face-to-face facilitation used in conjunction with a well-designed educational package in the scaling up of kangaroo mother care. METHODS Thirty-six h...

Good quality care of low birthweight infants could reduce neonatal mortality in low-income countries, but the technologies used in rich countries are inappropriate. Kangaroo Mother Care does not need expensive and sophisticated equipment, and for its simplicity it can be applied almost everywhere, including peripheral maternity units of very low-income countries. Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) can ...

“Kangaroo mother care” was first described as an alternative method of caring for low birth weight infants in resource-limited countries, where neonatal mortality and infection rates are high because of overcrowded nurseries, inadequate staffing, and lack of equipment. Intermittent skin-to-skin care (SSC), a modified version of kangaroo mother care, is now being offered in resource-rich countri...

In this paper, we introduce Kangaroo, a constraint-based local search system. While existing systems such as Comet maintain invariants after every move, Kangaroo adopts a lazy strategy, updating invariants only when they are needed. Our empirical evaluation shows that Kangaroo consistently has a smaller memory footprint than Comet, and is usually significantly faster.