Health Van and Health Camps:  The health van is a new program.  It has 3 roles:

• To organize village level health education programs and health melas and festivals – the van will have a slide projector, video projector, charts and a lot of health education materials to organize these melas.

• To organize weekly health camps on TB, gynecological problems, childhood illnesses etc and to work with the community health volunteer and the PHC to follow up with these patients.

• To serve in the cases of emergencies by rushing in medical help immediately.

We have already started work on several components in the above three programs:

• We have started the community health program in Koovathur and Kelambakkam – where we are working directly with village volunteers, maintaining registers and doing house to house counseling in 50 villages.

• We have also started this program through an NGO (SWC) in 40 villages in Nagai and Tiruvarur.

• Our health team has organized about 50 adolescent classes covering about 2500 girls.  We have also identified other organizations who want to take up the health class program and will be training them in the coming weeks.

• We have so far organized 5 one day Women’s Health Melas with 30 women each.

• We have got part support from Minoo Shroff and his friends for the health van and have almost finalized the van.  This program will be launched soon. We are hoping to work on this program along with the Health Development Forum – a voluntary team of doctors.

The strength of our health program has been that we directly work with the local community to help them address their own health needs and to demand services from the government system.  But this exclusive focus on the village has meant that so far we have not looked at the problems faced by the government system.  We have not tried to understand the difficulties faced by government doctors and VHNs or tried to help them become more effective. (This is something we have been doing systematically in education – where one big focus is improving the school itself apart from village level supplementary programs).  We are now starting a study of the local PHCs in Koovathur and Kelambakkam to see what kinds of improvements are possible there.