The Full Form of HBNC is‍ Home Based New Born Care.

In 1986, SEARCH established a vital rate surveillance system in the rural villages of Gadchiroli and discovered that the child mortality rate was way high than that claimed by Government of Maharashtra. In this rural area with high child mortality, SEARCH conducted a field trial (1988 to 1990) of the management of pneumonia in children. We had trained village health workers (VHWs), traditional birth attendants (TBAs) and paramedics in 58 villages in the management of childhood pneumonia, resulting, by the end of the interventions, in a reduction in the infant mortality rate (IMR) from 121 to 89 per 1000 live births. Post-1990, SEARCH faced the problem of stagnant Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) which was found to be due to high contribution of neonatal mortality and lack of effective neonatal health care in rural Gadchiroli. The medical fraternity’s conviction was that newborns can be treated only in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in specialised hospitals. These hospitals were in cities and out of reach of villagers, due to a complex combination of reasons including apathy, cost, lack of roads, unscientific belief system etc. Moreover, 84% of babies in villages of India were home delivered, under rampant unsanitary and hazardous living conditions. There was no community-based research data to gauge the magnitude of the problem and causes of death during the neonatal period. Hence, we conducted an observational study and collected the natural history of 763 live births, between 1995 and 1996, the world’s first study showing the prime causes of the neonatal deaths were sepsis and asphyxia.

The strategy of universal access to home based newborn care must necessarily complement the strategy of institutional deliveries, to achieve significant reduction in postpartum and neonatal mortality and morbidity.