NALAM - Community Healthcare Programme

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CCD's Community Health Intervention is aligned with the targets specified by WHO’s -Women’s Children’s and Adolescent’s Health improvement by 2030, whose over-arching objectives are to: end preventable mortality (Survive); enable women, children and adolescents to enjoy good health (Thrive) ensure transformative change and sustainable development which is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Health is one of the major livelihood and poverty reduction initiative. Poverty is not just the socio economic issue. As Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has observed, Poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as low income. Therefore, a coordinated programmes such as health, education, income generation, skill building and technology are needed to reduce the poverty. In the same way, livelihood sustainability and security also needs the similar effort.

Most poor people are wage earners, labourers and some own limited assets, which provide them income. Because of reduced physical capacity due to ill health, the number of earning days is reduced and they may be unable to manage the limited assets they own. This results in low income and loss of assets. Again, because of higher expenditure on health care, poor people become indebted and cannot expand their activities further, even if they have skills. This also leads to increased vulnerability.

The enormity and gravity of the problem of under-nutrition, and the contribution of behavioral determinants of this public health crisis has necessitated community level interventions. Related to this, women’s self-help groups (SHG) as platforms of facilitating such inter-mediation have gained importance. Besides being a medium through which positive changes are affected in terms of economic upliftment, capacity building, women’s status, psycho-social support and participation in socio-political processes, community organisations offer a strong incentive for strategic interventions in initiating behaviour change communication and altering nutrition and health related knowledge, practices and beliefs of women at a community level.

Our Target

Adolescent girls and the mothers of under-5 children are our primary target. Adolescents have little knowledge about the need of health services. They are scared of revealing their personal health issues to another person and getting examined by health workers of opposite sex, which is a major obstacle for the services to reach them. The mother of the under-5 children are the critical target group because their knowledge, attitude and practice only will decide the good health of the child. The present health care system focuses on the service delivery not on investing sufficiently to improve the behavior.

These issues bring out the need for women and adolescent friendly and complimentary programme with the major focus on behavioural change and convergence with the available services. The community organization platform where the mutual learning and peer pressure is high, offers an effective platform to implement the health intervention for achieving and sustaining the health outcomes. Hence, CCD works for enabling and empowering the communities to get access to good quality healthcare services through comprehensive healthcare by way of convergence with the mainstream healthcare system. 

Our Focus

• Addressing child malnutrition through proper food and preventing health issues.
• Providing comprehensive programme for adolescent girls starting with anemia reduction
• Improving the knowledge, attitude and practice of mothers towards their child and adolescent. 
• Promoting and introducing validated traditional food and home remedies

The objectives of the Intervention 

• Reducing anemia among child and adolescent girls
• Reducing Malnutrition among under-5 children
• Creating awareness on menstrual issues (irregular periods, PCOD, endometriosis etc.,) and creating access to health care 
• Reducing the morbidity level among member families by increasing the knowledge and practice on nutritious food intake.
• Reducing the healthcare expenditure of member families
• Increase the health seeking behaviour of individual

Key Strategies and Interventions

1. Social and Behaviour Change Communication: Innovative Behaviour Change Communication will be the key approach in negotiating changes in Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices at the individual, household and community levels. 
2. Promotion of traditional knowledge and practice on food and nutrition.
3. Ensuring the integration of home remedies and traditional healing practices through food and herbs
4. Promotion nutrition and herbal home garden for ensuring the availability of food and for good health
5. Working in convergence with the health department for ensuring the reach of quality health care services
6. Access to Diagnostic and Referral Services: Diagnosis of common morbidity and suitable referral become important in early identification of illness, which is turn, will reduce unnecessary expenditure due to late identification and inappropriate treatment. This involves arrangement of Block level diagnostic and referral camps that address major contextual illnesses.