Michuki Maina: Reducing infections in Kenyan neonatal units

My name is Dr Michuki Maina. I'm a research paediatrician here at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme. My work mainly looks at infections and how we can prevent and control infections within hospitals, mainly in the neonatal units and the paediatric units.

A recent research project that we've just completed is one where we are looking at how we can improve how infections are managed in neonatal units in Kenya. What we found is that most of the work is left to the nurse in terms of infection prevention and control, things like maintaining hand hygiene, cleaning equipment. And so, the work we've done is providing an assistant to the nurse, to help the nurse take care of the babies, but the assistant to help the nurse in cleaning the equipment, advising mothers to wash their hands, and improving general cleanliness in the unit.

The big question in our field, especially in resource-limited areas, is how can we really enhance infection prevention and control? In some of the areas, most of the infection prevention control challenges are behavioural. How can we improve behaviour of things like hand hygiene and waste management within hospital settings?

How our work makes a difference for patients is because our patients are mainly babies and children who come in extremely vulnerable, and what happens when they pick up infections within a hospital? These hospital-infections, what we call healthcare associated infections, tend to be quite severe, it takes a lot of time to get better, and extremely expensive. So, any way we can reduce infections being contracted within hospitals will make a difference with our patients.

Our line of research should attract funding because one of the things we're grappling with currently is antimicrobial resistance, and a lot of the infections that are acquired within the hospitals tend to be resistant to a lot of the first-line treatments that we have in our hospitals. And so, one of the ways to prevent and reduce antimicrobial resistance is really reducing these healthcare associated infections, which are really reduced by improving infection prevention and control in most of our units in Kenya.

This interview was recorded in September 2025.