Currently in development by a team of leading academics from the University of Oxford,
Life-saving Instruction For Emergencies (LIFE) is a mobile gaming app designed to
provide vital emergency care training to remote communities in sub-Saharan Africa
We hope to raise £100k through crowdfunding to develop and test a prototype of LIFE
PLEASE SUPPORT OUR CAMPAIGN!
The Challenge
During the human lifespan, the day of birth is also the day of the greatest risk of death. In Africa, 470,000 babies die each year on the day they are born, and this figure increases to 1 million deaths within the first 28 days - the neonatal period.
Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over two thirds of new-born deaths in Africa could be avoided through existing maternal and child healthcare programmes, if they were taught and implemented effectively.
Effective and scalable training of healthcare workers in Africa could therefore help save 670,000 lives a year.
The ETAT+ Programme
To address this issue, in 2006 Prof. Mike English designed the ETAT+ training programme in conjunction with colleagues in Kenya. ETAT+ builds on the original Emergency Triage Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) course, designed by the WHO. It uses scenario-based teaching to help healthcare workers learn life-saving, evidence-based care.
To date, over 5,000 healthcare workers and 2,000 medical students have been trained using ETAT+, with the course widely used in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, and introduced to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and, most recently, Myanmar.
However, only a tiny percentage of the 2.5 million healthcare workers in sub-Saharan Africa have been reached. We need a system that allows everyone to access and learn the essential steps to save lives in an emergency.
How can we solve this problem? We believe that our new game-based learning platform, LIFE, is part of the solution.