March 30, 2023By Teresa Gore

Laerdal Medical’s One Million Lives Campaign 2023 Update

Laerdal 1 Million Lives Campaign

Laerdal Medical has a goal of helping save one million more lives every year by 2030. Laerdal is much more than a “simulator” company, which has several arms including Laerdal Medical, Laerdal Global Health, Laerdal Foundation, and Laerdal Million Lives Fund. Laerdal’s global initiative is to help save lives through education and therapy solutions and services while becoming carbon neutral by 2030. In 2020 Laerdal established a goal to help save one million more lives, every year, by 2030 in a sustainable way, minimizing the impact on the environment. Laerdal understands that collaborative partnerships with the community (bystanders), first responders, and healthcare workers will be required to accomplish this goal. The aim of the Million Lives Fund is to educate and provide these lifesavers with the knowledge and skills to perform their role more effectively. This HealthySimulation.com article provides an update on the Laerdal initiative One Million Lives and an overview of Laerdal Medical’s Laerdal Global Health and the Laerdal Foundation.

More About Laerdal’s Organizations

Laerdal Medical is one of the world’s premiere vendors of medical simulation and clinical education equipment. Laerdal Medical began its mission to “Help Save Lives” in 1960 with the invention of the CPR training manikin called Resusci Anne. For over sixty years, Laerdal has provided the global healthcare simulation community with clinical task training and high fidelity manikin products ranging from the Laerdal pocket mask to the Laerdal SimMan 3G, and now the SimCapture audiovisual systems and even virtual reality. Currently, the company boasts more than 2000 employees in over 26 countries with as many as 50 international distributors. Laerdal Medical acquired B-Line Medical in 2019 to expand offerings in audiovisual recording and clinical simulation debriefing.

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Laerdal Global Health is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping save the lives of mothers and newborns. Since 2010, Laerdal Global Health has worked in close collaboration with partners to develop high-impact, low-cost solutions such as the NeoNatalie Newborn Simulator aimed at helping save lives. These solutions, implemented by Laerdal partners throughout the world, ensure that health workers are better trained, equipped, and supported to provide quality care and save mothers and babies at birth.

Additionally, through the Laerdal Foundation, the company has supported the research of best practices and practical implementations in acute medicine. To date, the foundation has supported almost 2,000 international research projects with more than 40 million dollars in supported funding.

Laerdal Million Lives Fund is a part of the Laerdal Corporation that invests in disruptive, data-driven technologies to impact life-saving. The goal is to enable the right care to be delivered at the right time by properly trained individuals through early interventions to reduce preventable and premature deaths. Another belief of the Laerdal Million Lives Fund is that tech-enabled healthcare systems can deliver accessible and affordable care globally by making healthcare proactive instead of reactive. The digital tools to improve clinical decision-making should be scalable, standardized, and based on high-quality care.

Laerdal One Million Lives

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One Million Lives was collaboratively created to reduce maternal, neonatal, or child mortality, accidents, and non-communicable diseases including sudden cardiac arrest, as identified by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Laerdal is committed to spending up to $500 million over the next ten years to innovatively impact these healthcare outcomes. Laerdal will seek up to $100 million in matching funds from other investors, with strategies that include:

  • Improving survival in the community Sudden Cardiac Death – Chain of Survival – high-quality CPR and early defibrillation
  • Quality care in the hospital
  • Saving lives at birth in low-resource settings: antenatal care, labor management, birth, postpartum care, and newborn care.
  • Strengthening midwifery education, scaling up “Kangaroo Mother Care” to help small babies, safer birth bundles, data-driven quality improvements, safer cesarean sections and anesthesia, and family planning.

The Impact and Sustainability Report Spring 2023 provides an update on reaching the goal of One Million Lives. The implementation yields a favorable high impact, which is provided in three areas: improving survival and saving lives in the community, improving quality of care in the hospital, and saving lives at birth.

Improving Survival and Saving Lives in the Community

One of Laerdal’s global impacts has focused on improving the quality of CPR to save lives. There have been 10 million new bystanders trained in quality community CPR using new CPR Training solutions. These solutions are RevivR and RQI-T (Resuscitation Quality Improvement). RevivR is a digital CPR program to potentially scale up CPR training and bystander CPR rates. The goal is to have 3 million RevivRs trained in the UK alone by 2025. Another quality improvement program is RQI-T which focuses on telephone-assisted CPR, an initiative that can cause a 2x increase in bystander CPR rates with telecommunicator CPR. These initiatives and the Global Resuscitation Alliance aim to double the survival rates in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Improving Quality of Care in Hospitals

Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) aims to save 50,000 more lives per year. Currently, there are 1.4 million healthcare providers enrolled in RQI in the US. By improving quality resuscitation efforts approximately 20,000 extra lives were saved over the last three years. Another initiative to improve the quality of care in the hospital is to decrease implicit bias and promote equitable care through increased diversity in race, gender, and age in the digital and physical patient simulators and simulation scenarios. New Laerdal manikins are more representative of the general population along with scenarios that incorporate socially, culturally, and ethnically diverse concepts across the lifespan. Strengthening healthcare education has occurred through scaling competency-based education solutions with SimCapture and vSim.

Saving Lives at Birth

Laerdal will focus on strengthening midwifery education through collaboration with partners to integrate simulation-based training into the education programs. There is a current need for over 900,000 new midwives to provide care to low-resource communities. By educating midwives, Laerdal hopes to provide a higher quality of care to improve maternal and newborn outcomes, saving an estimated 4.3 million mothers and newborns every year. Simulation integration has demonstrated a 2x improvement in midwifery skills, through examples such as:

  • Open access release by Laerdal of the CarePlus Kangaroo Mother Care pattern, which is manufactured at five sites in Ethiopia as part of the Saving Little Lives program and is designed to increase skin-to-skin contact.
  • Launch of Safer Birth Bundles program in Tanzania.
  • 50% of global maternal and newborn mortality occurs in humanitarian settings.
  • 35% goal for reduction in neonatal deaths.

Learn More About the Laerdal One Million Lives Campaign Here!

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healthcare simulation, laerdal, Laerdal Foundation, laerdal global health, laerdal medical, Laerdal Million Lives Fund, One Million Lives, patient safety, Teresa Gore
healthcare simulation, laerdal, Laerdal Foundation, laerdal global health, laerdal medical, Laerdal Million Lives Fund, One Million Lives, patient safety, Teresa Gore