3 tales of HEALTH FOR ALL

” & this is how we manage neonatal sepsis at our village level.” said Kajubai, a village health worker who is one of the main pillar of Home Based Newborn Care Model proposed by Dr Abhay Bang. The occasion was Nirman health camp in which about 50 medical students & doctors were participated. The doctors were totally mesmerised by a merely literate village health worker’s technique, competency & confidence. Most of the doctors didn’t know how to manage neonatal sepsis. Kajubai, very effectively taught the doctors & students about management of neonatal sepsis. Dr Abhay Bang could miraculously brought down the IMR of Gadchiroli even below the national average with the help of these just literate health workers.

Jan Swasthya Sahyog has it’s community programme running quite effectively in 58 villages since 15 years. We can see the significant behavioural change among people of these villages about their health. An efficiently trained team of 110 health workers working dedicatedly since many years is playing the role of change-maker in these villages.
“Daily, 20 to 22 patients comes to me for treatment from 18 villages. I manage them all. Initially, I had some problems but now I can confidently treat them. I suture the wounds, I conducts deliveries, I make slides for malarial parasites & I do many things. & out of 100 patients that I see, I refer only 5 to Ganiyari Center.” Said Kailasha- an ANM trained from JSS Ganiyari who is working very efficiently at Semariya subcenter. In this sense, she can treat more patients effectively than a general physician of city because she handles patients from all age groups. Her biggest plus point is that she stays in village & serves the village people. She is more accessible & comfortable than the sophisticated & knowledgeable doctors & hence more helpful & effective. Nursing school at JSS who is providing free ANM & GNM education for SC & ST girls produces one of the most qualified & passionate nurses among entire state of Chhattisgarh. The nurses who are passed out from JSS are doing great jobs in various government & private hospitals & supporting their families. I think this is real public empowerment.

Health workers are the backbone of any country’s health system especially more meaningful in the low resource countries like India. Health worker based health care delivery is one of the most practical way to provide services available & affordable to all. Ideally, doctors should go to the rural areas & provide their services at affordable rates, but this seems to be a distant dream. There are many successful models across India & world in which health workers are making wonders with their dedication & hard work.

One of the pioneer community health programme COMPREHENSIVE RURAL HEALTH PROJECT has the same village health workers based structure. Once in May 1988, in a huge conference hall at Washington DC, many officials from WHO, UNICEF & representatives from various other nations were listening to a Village Health Worker of CRHP- Jamkhed. She told that- “Doctors are like the attractive chandeliers, beautiful, attractive & exquisite but expensive & inaccessible. Health workers are like lamps simple & inexpensive but it can transfer it’s light to another lamp & this can enlighten the whole earth. This is ‘Health For All’.”