The urban health landscape has different priorities and challenges and the launch of the National Urban Health Mission is welcome news. SNEHA works extensively on urban health issues, especially amongst women and children in vulnerable, slum communities of Mumbai. We have gathered, in 15 years, a lot of evidence and real ground information on the issues and challenges in urban slums. We make the following recommendations to the national policy based on our experiences:
- Creation of Mahila Arogya Samitis to act as eyes and ears in the community, acting as community mobilisers and for awareness generation. They are effective in facilitating health education with community women and in encouraging them to reach out to more women for spread awareness on maternal health and make women informed and empowered.
- Our experience shows that a link worker can be a valuable resource for delivering health messages on antenatal care (ANC), spacing between births and planned parenthood. Link workers (AWWs) can be trained to recognise, refer and help in the management of acute malnutrition.
- Appropriate referral of pregnant women between the various available health tiers (health post, maternity homes, peripheral and tertiary hospitals) can help save lives. This has been demonstrated successfully by our referral system in the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai This can be further augmented by effective use of the government sponsored and supported 108 GPRS enabled emergency ambulance service for quick patient transfer.
- Cross-sectoral convergence of the state and government machinery. A well monitored collaboration between the municipal health posts, maternity homes and hospitals and the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) can help bring down infant and maternal mortality.
- Special attention should be paid to adolescents and youth, especially with respect to anaemia as well as sexual and reproductive health and life.
- There is a need for adopting and recognising gender based violence as a public health concern. It will serve to recognise the need for preventive action within the public health education in medical colleges and in the public hospital systems.
– Dr Shanti Pantvaidya, Executive Director, SNEHA
- Advertisement -
