COMMUNITY HEALTH
One of the major problems in poor and neglected rural communities is health – or rather, the opposite of health. It is obvious that a good health is indispensable for anyone trying to emerge from poverty. Unfortunately, the consequences of poor sanitary facilities, unhygienic practices, and lack of safe water and health care are visible in many rural villages.
ASSIST strongly believes that before implementing a variety of measures to improve community health, its members should first become aware of the problematic conditions they are living in.
Our experience is that what we see as problematic or unhygienic, is often not regarded as such by people who have lived under these circumstances all their lives. Hence, our major task is to encourage people to reflect on their situation and prepare them to discuss their needs and possible solutions within their community during special health camps.
We promote primary health care through intensive health education on various issues.
While we focus on women of childbearing age and children under five, our community health programme covers issues like family welfare, mother and childcare, nutrition, drinking water, environmental sanitation and personal hygiene, immunisation and patient care.
In remote areas where people have never visited a medical specialist, we organise massive health check-up camps. We also motivate people to grow vegetables and high yielding pulses in kitchen gardens and to raise chickens in backyard poultries in order to increase the availability of proper nutrition.