Making a real impact: life changing innovation

I’ve been fortunate to work on so many different interesting things and with amazing people throughout my career but this year came a life-changing, life-saving transformational project which tops the lot.

Working with the University of Liverpool, Royal Liverpool hospitals an NHS engineering design unit in Wales, and Sanyu, a specialist research unit based at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, with strong links with Uganda, BakerBaird provided the communications and impact resource to take an innovation and promote it globally.

The outcomes will save lives.

Every year, six million babies worldwide will need assistance to take their first breath. Of these four million will die before they are a month old. The BabySaver is a simple device which allows midwives and specialists to intervene leaving the oxygen-bringing umbilical cord intact.

Our work supported the team in the UK and Africa to create impact in Uganda, to engage with those who would use it. And across the UK, Europe, North America and further afield we communicated to capture interest from medics, potential investors and manufacturers to realise the full benefits of the device.

Media impact was global with pieces in  and the BBC World Service among many others reaching 42million. A first for me was hitting national outlets in Vietnam and Uganda. But more important to us was the interest generated from the World Health Organisation and medics across the world.

More than that, the opportunity to run a media launch in Uganda as well as the UK meant that I was confronted with the reality of what this innovation could do.

As I stood in a maternity unit in MBale, a town seven hours drive from Kampala, towards the Kenyan border, I witnessed and captured on film the moment a father met his son for the very first time, safely delivered and healthy.

As Higher Education Institutions across the UK look towards Research Excellence Framework in 2021, it is UK innovations making a global, life-changing impact such as the BabySaver which underline how our people have passion, commitment and no little skill to consistently punch above our weight.

I hope 2019 holds another project of such significance, working with such amazing people, and if it does, I’ll be more than content.