Joy Lawn

Lawn started to coordinate neonatal death and stillbirth estimates for the United Nations with the United Nations Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group from 2004.[12] She developed the first cause of death estimates for neonatal deaths, which was published in The Lancet in 2005.[13] She found in Uttar Pradesh neonatal mortality rates were as high as 60 in 1000 livebirths and 41 per 1000 in Sub-Saharan Africa.[3] In her report she called for an end to the 'unconscionable' 450 newborn deaths per hour.[13] She developed the continuum of care for reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH).[14] She co-led The Lancet Stillbirth series in 2011 and 2016.[15][16] She worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to identify that in 2008 there were 2.65 million stillbirths worldwide, with 67% occurring in rural families.[15] The report found that over 98% of the stillbirths worldwide were in middle and low-income families.[17] Lawn presented a Lancet TV series on Ending the Stillbirth epidemic.[18]

She was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the Director of Evidence and Policy for Save the Children, Saving Newborn Lives Program.[19] She was appointed to the Department for International Development Senior Research Fellow for newborn health in 2011 to 2015.[12] She has worked to draw attention to equity issues and was involved with the Countdown to 2015 initiative.[20] Lawn works on improving community engagement with national policy on healthcare, emphasising that in some countries people will choose to give birth at home even when there are nearby facilities, especially if quality of care is poor. Improving the quality of care at birth in hospitals could save 2 million lives a year [21][22] Lawn's The Lancet Neonatal Survival Series (2005) was followed ten years later by the Every Newborn Series, which advocated for quality care, facilities and community action at birth. This series led to the UN's Every Newborn Action Plan, and the first ever Global Goal for every country to reduce newborn deaths [23]

Preterm birth was made a World Health Organization priority to reach Millennium Development Goal 4.[24] Lawn believes that kangaroo care could prevent death and disability caused by preterm birth and is an important foundation for intensive care that is family centred.[25] In 2014 she studied preterm birth worldwide, which is now the number one killer of young children under five worldwide.[26][27] She estimated that over one million children under 5 years old died from complications of pregnancy.[26] These realisations motivated Lawn and Mary Kinney with the March of Dimes and 50 partner agencies to author the Born Too Soon Global Action Report on preterm birth, the first ever estimates of preterm birth by country.[24][28][29] They found that 44% of child deaths globally occurred during the first month.[30] The report was included as a commitment on the Every Woman Every Child website.[24] Group B streptococcal infection is an important perinatal pathogen.[31] Lawn works on Group B streptococcal infection, hoping to improve health system measurements and intervention trials.[4] In estimates published with Anna Seale and 103 other authors, Group B Strep was found to be responsible for at least 150,000 preventable infant deaths and stillbirths a year.[31]