Simba has worked with newborns for 15 years in one of the busiest neonatal units in Zimbabwe, which has a 100 bed capacity. The challenge of working with limited resources has built resilience, and a quest to explore simple technologies and low-cost interventions to improve newborn and maternal survival in low-income settings. This led Simba and colleagues at Sally Mugabe Central Hospital to adopt and further develop the Neotree platform. Through Neotree, data capture and use dramatically improved, and started to change not only clinical care but wider policy within the unit around how best to care for babies. The electronic medical records system enables routine audits to be carried out and the data to be shared with staff on a monthly basis.

Simba is a pediatrician, epidemiologist and medical educator at the University of Zimbabwe, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.