Dr. Hege Langli Ersdal to Deliver Plenary Lecture at NLN Education Summit Opening Session

Dr. Hege Langli Ersdal to Deliver Plenary Lecture at NLN Education Summit Opening Session

Public Health Initiative Shows Safer Birth Simulation Training Saves Maternal & Newborn Lives

Washington, DC — Hege Langli Ersdal, MD, PhD—a Norwegian anesthesiologist and leading researcher who has spearheaded a global public health undertaking to make birth and delivery safer for mothers and their newborns by incorporating simulation training into day-of-birth care—will be a featured Plenary speaker at the Opening Session of the 2024 NLN Education Summit in San Antonio, Texas, on September 18.

Her talk, Simulations Save Lives!, will directly follow the Summit keynote address and showcase the impressive results of her original study 15 years ago, developed in collaboration with midwives in Tanzania. The onsite investigation was conducted in association with Safer Births Bundle of Care, a program to reduce maternal and newborn mortality. Following the introduction of simulation training to respond to day-of-birth emergencies, the early death of both mothers and infants in more than 300,000 deliveries dropped by about 50 percent.

Dr. Ersdal will also describe how the program has since been progressively scaled up, with funding from the World Bank, now successfully operating in 152 hospitals in diverse communities worldwide.

Over the past 15 years, local hospital facilitators trained in simulation and QI methodologies have led weekly simulations and addressed procedure-performance gaps, guided by their own clinical data. The resulting broad evidence base has demonstrated the program’s sustained impact on improving clinical care and helping prevent early maternal and newborn death from delivery room and post-delivery emergencies in busy, often under-resourced health care environments.

“Dr. Ersdal’s important research reinforces the value of simulation-based training to improve patient outcomes in low-income nations and beyond. We are eager to learn about how she and her team brought this sophisticated technology into the specialized field of maternal and neonatal emergency and critical care to break new ground in patient safety during what can be an emotional and stressful time for any family,” said NLN Chair Patricia Sharpnack, DNP, RN, CNE, NEA-BC, ANEF, FAAN, Dean and Strawbridge Professor at the Breen School of Nursing and Health Professions at Ursuline College in Ohio.

NLN President and CEO Beverly Maline, PhD, RN, FAAN, said, “We salute Dr. Ersdal and her dedicated midwife research partners as outstanding exemplars of inter-professional collaboration, a hallmark of the National League for Nursing. We have long supported interprofessional education and academic-clinical partnerships that reflect the differing strengths and experiences of nurses and nurse educators, physician-colleagues, and related health care professionals to advance the health of the nation and the global community.”

For more information about the NLN Education Summit, visit Summit.NLN.org.

About Hege Langli Ersdal, MD, PhD

Since 2009, Dr. Ersdal has been the principal investigator of several large international research and development projects for Safer Births, an initiative designed to improve quality of care and patient outcomes related to day-of-birth events through the implementation of simulation-based learning. Her studies have been undertaken in both under-resourced and high-resource health care and delivery settings.

As part of the Safer Births program, she has also supervised 16 doctoral students in the completion of their PhDs and is supervising another 20 current PhD candidates in both low- and high-income countries. Approximately 130 of her scholarly papers have been published in peer-reviewed international journals.

An anesthesiologist with a PhD in international health from the University of Oslo, Dr. Ersdal is a professor on the faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Stavanger in Norway, as well as head of research, simulation, and global health and leader of the Critical Care and Anesthesiology Research Group at Stavanger University Hospital.

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