Local neonatal antibiotic project wins national award

An innovative project enabling newborn babies to go home sooner has won the award for Best Local Project at this year’s British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) Gopi Menon Awards.  

Neonatal Oral Antibiotics at Home (NOAH) enables eligible newborns with suspected early onset infection to switch from IV antibiotics in hospital to oral antibiotics at home after 36 hours of treatment. 

The initiative – a collaboration between Health Innovation South West, Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, the NIHR Applied Research Collaborative South West Peninsula (PenARC) and the South West Neonatal Network – is transforming care for newborn babies in the South West, allowing them to go home with their families sooner, minimising potential risk from gentamicin exposure, lowering costs to the NHS, and optimising workforce capacity.   

The project was announced as winner of Best Local Project at the BAPM Gopi Menon Awards at the BAPM Annual Conference in Cardiff this week. The awards recognise outstanding contributions in perinatal care. 

Shifting care from hospital to home is particularly important in a rural region like the South West Peninsula – where families face long travel distances to hospitals and other neonatal care services.   

One of the families to benefit from the project were parents Emily and Harry and their daughter Luna from Woodbury, Devon. Emily was shown how to administer antibiotics to Luna at home.  

“To be able to come home with antibiotics for Luna during my first few days as a mum made all the difference for us as a family”, said Emily. “It meant we could be together, especially since my partner was on summer leave from the military. We had such a short time together, and I’m so grateful for that precious time as a family.”  

Learn more about NOAH and its impact in our video. 

NOAH isn’t the first project we support to win a Gopi Menon award. In 2022, PERIPrem (Perinatal Excellence to Reduce Injury in Premature Birth) won Best National/Regional Project.