Community Action for Health is a key strategy of the National Health Mission (NHM), which places people at the centre of the process to ensure their health needs and rights are being fulfilled. It allows them to monitor the progress of the NHM interventions regularly in their areas resulting in active community participation and contribution towards strengthening health services.
(a) formation and strengthening of Village Health, Sanitation and Nutrition Committees (VHSNCs) at the village level, and Planning and Monitoring Committees (PMC) at the PHC, block, district and state levels.
(b) Creating community awareness on NHM entitlements, roles and responsibilities of the service providers
(c) Training of VHSNC and PMC members
(d) Undertaking community level enquiry to monitor health services
(e) Organizing Jan Samwaad (public dialogue) for advocacy with key stakeholders to highlight gaps and find solutions
(f) Follow up action and planning to address issues emerging from the community level enquiry and Jan Samwaad.
Assam was one of the nine states selected for implementation of the pilot during 2007- 2009. The community monitoring programme was implemented in nine blocks covering three districts - Dhemaji, Chirang and Kamrup.
In 2012-13, the programme was scaled up to five districts - Dhemaji, Chirang, Kamrup, Jorhat and Cachar covering 5,678 VHSNCs spread over 2,271 villages and 34 BPHCs.
Community Action for Health (CAH) is implemented in 18 districts covering all blocks and 40 selected VHSNCs from each Block. 4200 VHSNCs have been covered in 105 BPHCs in 18 districts. These18 districts are clubbed into 4 zones. Current phase of CAH is implemented with support from state Nodal NGO and Zonal NGOs.
Member strength of VHSNC meeting have gone up from 5-6 to 15 and their participation is improving satisfactorily.
All districts have reported holding of VHSNC meeting regularly and encouraging to note that Maternal and Child health issues have started getting priority attention.
IEC activities have gone up and I Card have been provided to members which boost up their confidence level.
Status of Untied Fund has been documented well and findings shared at Block and district level.
Identification and profiling of Mothers groups in tea garden is completed.
Taken up advocacy with Labour Welfare Officers.
Sensitization of VHSNC members regarding their participation in VHND.
VHSNCs members are trained.
Efforts initiated to converge with RD & PR department/SIRD to integrate health agendas in the GPDPs.
The key objectives for the Baseline Survey were to:
Identify the critical gaps that need to be addressed during the implementation of the programme.
Prepare intervention plans based on the identified gaps.
Follow up on the improvements over the gaps periodically.
A set of 5 checklists and support guidelines were developed by AGCA Secretariat.
As no baseline in the context of the Community Action for Health (CAH) was done in the state. The mobile app CS pro was used to ease the data collection and collation for generating reports for the analysis. The findings can now be used for providing support to VHSNCs in a more specific way. The findings have provided clarity in areas where VHSNCs require advance support for scaling up their performance. Besides this, it can be carried out in rest of VHSNCs as well.