Creating Health Awareness and Access to Health Care - through Community Health Leaders
Location
Healing Fields is a not-for-profit organization that aims to make quality healthcare affordable to all sections of the society. Through our diverse expertise and varied healthcare management programs, we serve to bring quality healthcare to the poor, marginalized and underprivileged sections of the society. We work with other non-governmental organizations, the private healthcare sector and the government to ensure access to basic healthcare services for the underprivileged. We use innovative financing initiatives to make healthcare affordable, and health management tools to improve healthcare delivery.
Community Health Leader Approach
Our approach towards healthcare is comprehensive, encompassing all aspects of prevention and cure, thus allowing us to create a sustainable impact in the society. Through our Community Health Leader (CHL) program, we identify potential women who could be health leaders in the underprivileged and marginalized communities. These women, then undergo our health leader program where they are taught the basics of health education and are thus empowered to be “agents of change” in the society. For this “change” to be implemented, we also believe that we need to build the requisite primary health and sanitation infrastructure such as toilets, dispensaries, clinics etc. Infrastructure design is preceded by real time, on-site field data through our surveys, carried out through CHLs. On-field data is continuously transmitted to us through specially designed mobile phone based software solutions; and used for designing primary healthcare strategies in the surveyed areas.
Empowerment, we believe, is not just through education but through self-sustenance. We believe that to truly make a difference, we have to help people help themselves. Our work at the grassroots level, along with our experience in health financing and strategic design, has allowed us to build-up a strong expertise in primary healthcare.
Dual Focus
Improved Community Health Outcomes &
Income Generation Micro Enterprise Opportunity for Women
We are running several projects and initiatives to empower our CHL for self-sustenance to serve the communities they live in. Part of the strategy is to position our CHLs to provide the “last mile” connectivity to rural and remote locations by distributing the products to the customers that are directly connected to healthcare improvements at the communities they live in.
Reason:
Healing Fields is an Ashoka Fellow organization and has been a thought leader in the areas of health and health financing. It has been the first organization to pioneer a micro health insurance program based on the DRG model in India. There were several innovations in the approach of this program like the need based products developed with unique benefits, facilitation support at the network hospitals, follow up, health education and prevention to improve wellness and reduce the claims on prevnetable illnesses and nurse manned dispensaries. These innovations have helped in creating high impact. The current Community Health leader training program is focussed on a more comprehensive approach to health care with wellness and disease prevention as the key objectives. This program is again very uniquely designed interms of the training structure, mentoring and support, field implementation, assignments and projects. Healing Fields has been a changemaker by bringing about positive health behaviour changes in the communities by developing people from within as change agents / community health leaders. Not stopping at this Healing Fields, considering the sustainability to the health leader is training them to be micro health enterpreneurs, where they harness their learning and are able to set up profitable intiatives like sanitary napkin, nutrition products manufacture and sale. This way the access to these essential products is also created in the remote villages, bringing a health impact. In the area of health financing, currently the private and public health insyrance programs are catering to the need for hospitalization and critical illnesses. However the outpatient consultation, medicine and diagnostic expenses are not covered in any insurance and are still a burden for the poor with limited access to borrowing. To help the poor in this area Healing Fields has developed its innovative model of Health Savings and loans and has successfully piloted it in Andhra Pradesh. Now this is being scaled to Bihar & Orissa. Healing fields has always been understanding the needs of the poor communities it is working with and developing innovative programs to suit their needs and create impact.
Organization:
Healing Fields Foundation
First name:
Mukteshwari
Last name:
Bosco
City:
Hyderabad
Country:
India
