How Oman Built One of the Region’s Quietest Neonatal Programmes

Behind a near-invisible statistic — newborn survival — sits a forty-year story that begins in New Orleans in 1987 and lands, this week, on the ninth edition of a curriculum now woven into every Omani delivery room.

By Omanspire • 29 April 2026

Every year, roughly one in ten newborns anywhere in the world will need some kind of help breathing in the first minutes of life. Fewer than one in a hundred will need full resuscitation. The numbers are small. The window is small. And yet whether or not a trained pair of hands is in the room when those minutes happen is, for the baby, the difference between a story and a statistic.

This week, Khoula Hospital in Muscat formally launched the ninth edition of the Neonatal Resuscitation Program — known internationally as NRP — a curriculum so widely adopted that it has become the unspoken global standard for what should happen in the first sixty seconds of a difficult birth. For Oman, it is the latest chapter in a long, careful project to build a neonatal infrastructure that international rankings rarely notice but Omani parents quietly benefit from every day.

A curriculum born in New Orleans

The curriculum itself is American in origin. NRP was launched in November 1987 by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association, after years of NICU expansion in the United States exposed the absence of any standardised approach to what midwives, paediatricians and respiratory therapists should actually do in the first minutes of a newborn’s life. Within a year of launch, the programme had reached forty-eight US states and Canada. Over the following four decades, it would train more than three million clinicians worldwide.

From five trainers to a national infrastructure

Oman’s adoption was not immediate, but it was deliberate. According to Dr Mohammed Al-Yahmadi, senior consultant in neonatal intensive care at Khoula, the country’s first formally certified NRP trainers were accredited in 2007 — five clinicians in total, three from Royal Hospital and two from Khoula. That small core of trainers became the seed of a national programme. By 2011, simulation-based training had been introduced, with pulse oximetry monitoring and high-fidelity manikins replacing the older method of demonstration on dolls. By 2012, certified Omani trainers were running NRP courses at the Oman Medical Specialty Board and across the country’s hospitals.

The international recognition followed. In 2022, the American Heart Association began accrediting overseas training centres directly. Oman’s Medical Specialty Board and Sohar Hospital were among the first international centres to receive that accreditation. Sultan Qaboos University Hospital followed in 2023. The current ninth edition of NRP, launched at Khoula this month, brings the global curriculum’s most recent revisions — broader integration of digital training tools, refined protocols for the management of premature newborns, stronger emphasis on team communication — into Omani practice in real time.

What this looks like in a delivery room

What this means in a delivery room is harder to photograph than infrastructure projects, but it is more consequential. The Khoula NICU, described by Dr Al-Yahmadi as the country’s first such unit and still its largest, handles many of the highest-risk cases referred from across northern Oman. He told the programme’s launch that Oman has, over the past decade, registered some of the lowest neonatal mortality figures in the region — an outcome he attributes largely to the gradual nationalisation of training and the increasing density of certified providers across the governorates.

The Ministry of Health’s stated ambition, announced last year, is to extend NRP-accredited resuscitation centres to every Omani governorate. That is administrative language for a clinical reality: that the standard which currently saves babies in Muscat should also be the standard saving babies in Salalah, Sur, Khasab and Sohar. The unglamorous work of building that consistency — training trainers, retraining trainers, updating protocols, ensuring that the equipment in a small wilayat hospital is the same equipment a clinician was trained on — is what infrastructure actually looks like inside healthcare.

Quiet by design

There is something faintly counter-cultural about how Oman has approached this. In a region where health investment is often visible — vast hospital towers, imported specialists, headline-grabbing partnerships — neonatal care is, by its nature, invisible. It happens in seconds. It is conducted by Omani trainers educating other Omani clinicians who will, in turn, teach the next generation. The investment compounds quietly. The outcome shows up not in announcements but in the routine discharge form a parent signs after a normal release.

Looking forward, Khoula’s neonatology team has signalled that the next phase will integrate artificial-intelligence-assisted decision support into delivery rooms, with algorithms reading vital signs in real time alongside the human clinician, and virtual-reality simulation extending high-fidelity training to remote facilities. Both are emerging globally; both are likely to be tested in Omani settings ahead of regional peers, given the country’s existing depth of certified trainers.

For now, though, the more striking achievement is the older one: that a small Gulf state, beginning with five trainers in 2007, has built a national neonatal resuscitation infrastructure aligned in real time with the global standard, and has done so without much fanfare. The babies whose first breaths are saved by it will never know. Their parents may never know either. That is the nature of infrastructure that works. It does not call attention to itself. It simply leaves a generation healthier than the one before.

Adapted from reporting by Ghalia Al-Dhakri, originally published in Arabic by Oman Daily, 29 April 2026. English reporting and adaptation by Omanspire.

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