Neonatal Rescue

What started through a Ballard Center challenge has now grown into an impactful organization providing lifesaving solutions for infants around the world. Neonatal Rescue creates infant ventilators and CPAP machines that can be used in developing countries at a low cost. The organization also trains medical professionals and offers engineering support to ensure the best outcomes for infants.

BYU students were able to instruct Cambodian doctors and nurses on how to use the ventilator and how to evaluate its effectiveness.

In 2016, the Ballard Center purchased the rights to a BYU engineering capstone project that had worked to develop a ventilator prototype. The Ballard Center then hosted a competition for student teams to create a social enterprise proposal for how they would use the ventilator to address infant mortality. With the help of their mentor Dr. Stephen Minton, Kindall & Erica Palmer and Rob Brown entered the Y-Prize Newborn Challenge and proposed a way to adapt the infant ventilators to be lower cost to increase accessibility for doctors and nurses in developing countries. This group of students won the Ballard Center competition and the grand prize of $100,000, allowing the team to scale the project to become Neonatal Rescue, an organization now working to save thousands of infant lives worldwide, with an estimated potential to save 80,000+ babies per year in Cambodia and East Africa.

This cause hit extra close to home when Neonatal Rescue cofounders, Erica and Kindall Palmer, had their first baby. Their newborn son lost oxygen and started turning blue. He was life-flighted to a children’s hospital and quickly hooked up to an infant ventilator. “Without the technologies of ventilation and CPAP, he wouldn’t have made it far at all,” says Kindall.

Neonatal Rescue works with expert respiratory therapists and local medical professionals to ensure that its products are the best they can be. The organization travels to countries such as Cambodia to learn about the specific needs of the area, evaluate the effectiveness of its products, and train medical professionals on how to use these products.

Cambodia is especially at risk for issues with infant mortality because of a genocide in the 1970s, where the Khmer Rouge targeted those with an education and killed many of the medical professionals. “They killed millions and millions of Cambodians during that time and really put the country back, as far as development goes,” explains Neonatal Rescue CEO Rob Brown. “We saw that really rural and remote areas that are impoverished, and mothers would have babies born in these remote clinics or health care centers, and they wouldn't have the equipment or the training that they need.”

Brown explains that Neonatal Rescue is also working to break the referral problem in Cambodia, where mothers are referred from hospital to hospital only to keep finding them filled to capacity with patients and without adequate resources. Brown explains, “By providing a low-cost, easy-to-use piece of equipment, we can place it at those frontline clinics and try to meet the needs and to address the patient issues there.”

Neonatal Rescue has worked in Cambodia for several years but had not been able to visit the country since 2019 due to COVID-19. In October 2022, the Ballard Center helped plan and sponsor a trip for Brooke Stacey and Brent Kamba, two BYU graduate nursing students, to accompany Neonatal on its latest trip to Cambodia. These nursing students and Neonatal Rescue were able to instruct Cambodian doctors and nurses on how to use the ventilator and how to evaluate its effectiveness.

Brooke Stacey is in the family nurse practitioner program at BYU and has worked as a registered nurse in pediatric and cardiac ICUs for six years, shared, “Working with Neonatal Rescue in Cambodia was a transformative experience. The relationships I developed with the Cambodian healthcare workers gave me new perspectives on healthcare and helped me grow as a practitioner. It was remarkable to witness how additional education, medical supplies, friendships, and the NeoLife ventilators have made a considerable difference to infant mortality rates.”