At IHG we strive to get a clear and meaningful understanding of newborn respiratory needs and at the same time an understanding of clinical needs and processes.

The ResusiSure masks have FDA and TGA registration and in the process of getting CE approvals. This new generation of neonatal mask has taken many years to develop and has shown to be leak free during neonatal resuscitation to ensure no baby should miss a breath.

The story begins twenty years ago with Debbie Ritz, working as an independent Midwife in New Zealand and now as a delivery midwife in Australia.

Debbie felt that the life and death situation of newborn resuscitation was too critical and important to rely on an operator technique getting a seal on an infant’s face with the masks in use. She lamented over and over again that there had to be a better way to seal on an infant’s face. Debbie said, “We have such wonderful resuscitation equipment made by the best companies in the world, but where the rubber meets the road all this equipment’s clever engineering fails, the resuscitation mask, it’s an incredibly stressful situation to be in struggling to get a seal all the while the newborn requires air and the clock is ticking.”

Debbie approached her engineer and businessman husband Gavin Ritz and asked him if it would be possible to make an infant resuscitation mask that makes a perfect seal and can be used by those practitioners who don’t do infant resuscitation on a daily basis, making it much simpler to do infant resuscitation.

Gavin went to work at the urging of Debbie to solve the sealing problem. It turned out there was not an obvious or easy solution, as not a lot of materials will make a 100% seal on human skin. After many different types of prototypes and hundreds of failures a number of sealing methods for resuscitation masks was developed.

Later mask enhancements were also developed that allows the mask to be converted to a CPAP mask that also is leak free to be used on very premature newborns.