15 Dec NEPAL: NGO educates female health workers to raise community awareness
Article posted on December 15, 2016.
Public Health Perspective Nepal adapts pneumonia advocacy materials to empower local influencers
This story is part of the 2016 round-up of World Pneumonia Day. Events and campaigns were held in many countries around the world to remind policymakers that pneumonia is still a silent killer taking the lives of many young children. Child health advocates and members of the Global Coalition Against Child Pneumonia organized various advocacy strategies to shine light on the need to continue the fight to bring an end to this disease.
On World Pneumonia Day, a group of women donning bright blue saris gathered in Taplejung District, Nepal. In this remote district of the Eastern Development Region, the women attended a local health care worker training focused on pneumonia prevention, organized by Public Health Perspective (PHP) Nepal.
PHP is a non-governmental, non-political, and non-profit organization composed of health professionals in Nepal. The group’s work includes improving public health awareness in rural communities.
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For the pneumonia advocacy training, PHP Nepal drew from resources provided by StopPneumonia.org to create a presentation and posters. In particular, the official World Pneumonia Day 2016 Advocacy Presentation was translated from English to Nepali to meet the language needs of the trainees. PHP Nepal hopes the women will use the knowledge they gained on World Pneumonia Day to inform their work and raise awareness in their communities.
The participants were Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHV) and health workers from the District Hospital. The FCHV program began in 1988 and now reaches all 75 districts of Nepal. The women complete an 18-day training and are equipped with educational materials. Once dispatched to their communities, they distribute a variety of health resources, like vitamin A capsules and condoms, and educate families on healthy habits and health care services.
