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How Canada boosted survival rates for our tiniest babies

Canada has become a global leader in neonatal care, with premature babies born at 22 weeks now surviving with fewer complications, a dramatic shift from two decades ago when such survival was nearly impossible.
In 1995, Dr. Shoo Lee founded the Canadian Neonatal Network to address poor national outcomes by organizing hospitals to submit standardized data to a national database for comparison.
By 2012, 31 NICUs were sharing data, enabling hospitals to implement critical changes like increasing operating room temperatures and maximizing skin-to-skin contact, reducing severe complications by 25 per cent for babies born before 32 weeks.
Dr. Prakeshkumar Shah, who became CNN director in 2012, extended this model globally by co-creating iNEO, an international network collecting data from 13 countries to improve neonatal care worldwide.
Beyond survival rates, experts now focus on improving long-term quality of life for premature infants, with Shah emphasizing that brain resilience and early interventions remain essential for developmental outcomes.

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