Our Work - Educate
Community Health Improvement Program (CHIP)
We know from reports that the health level in the country is very poor. Our national health system is not adequate to provide necessary health services to all. Given the present health scenario of the country it is quite clear that external force alone will not be able to change it. Health will be achieved for all only if a community takes the responsibility of improving the health of its people, which means internal empowerment of the community is important. Our experiences over the years have proved this is possible through building capacity of the community. SXSSS has made efforts to improve their health through two approaches: One, spreading awareness in the community through various activities as well as delivering health services and second, training community health workers who belong to the community so that they can understand the community health problems. Improvement in health through enabling the community would be more sustainable.
Our health interventions have mainly focused on capacity building of the community through various means. These interventions fall under mainly three categories:
- Building capacity through creating health awareness (this includes our efforts at personal level through interactions and providing services): Regular interaction with people is done for awareness. In awareness activities we try to disseminate information about the curative and preventive aspects of diseases, illnesses or the problems which are prevalent in the areas at that time. Home visits, focused meetings (meeting with a group of people when necessity arises), area level meetings, referring cases to experts, counselling, health check-up, and the like, are the tools used to spread awareness.
- Building capacity through trainings and camps (this includes our efforts at the mass community level): Trainings and camps are organized for different participants for building their capacity through mass awareness. Apart from that health education is given to children in various areas.
- Networking for health (this includes our efforts to reach out to different stake holders and thus reach out to more people to improve their health): Networking has proved to be an important tool to provide basic health services to thousands of people. Through networking it is possible to join different stake holders to a common goal. Believing in the strength of networking SXSSS is making constant efforts so that health services of the experts and government organizations reach out to the people at the margin. Networking has proved to be an important tool even in our day-to-day activities. Critical Illness Eradication Centre, Health Forum and community Health Workers’ Training Programmes are the examples of effectiveness of networking.
Critical Illness Eradication Centre
To advance a step towards eradicating critical illnesses with a holistic approach the organization has set up a Critical Illness Eradication Centre in St. Mary’s Nursing Home, Gomtipur on 8-10-09 in collaboration with St. Mary’s Nursing home and Sardar Patel De-addiction Centre of Gujarat Government. The objective is to establish a centre at the city level which helps providing health services (including guidance, information, counselling, treatment and follow-up) to the patients with critical illnesses through networking with different health agencies and experts. The centre collaborates with government departments for treatment of these illnesses.
Community Health Workers’ Training Programme
Community Health Workers’ Training Programme is an effort of the organization to reach out to rural areas intervening to improve their status of health through the medium of networking with different stake holders. It focuses on empowering the community and thus enabling it to fulfil its health needs. Extensive networking with various stake holders like grass-root organizations working in the field of health, trainee health workers, expert resource persons, health organizations, and so on, remains the strength of the training programme. Our health programme could spread the message of ‘health for all’ to thousands of people as a result of networking.
Training workshops cover various health topics extensively starting from safe motherhood, child health to general health, acupressure and Yoga. Apart from information regarding these topics practical training is also included. Understanding the need of learning the social skills of documentation, networking, communication, counselling etc to effectively operate in the villages we have included these topics also.
Started in 1990, 6 training programmes have been carried out till 2009. Through these programmes we have been able to reach out to more than 1000 villages of 15 districts (50 centres).