In Bangladesh, about one-third of the population lives in urban areas with worse health situation in slums and squatters in cities. To improve the health status of the slum population, particularly women and children, BRAC started Manoshi, a community based healthcare programme, in 2007 at urban slums of nine city corporations around Bangladesh through development and delivery of an integrated, community-based package of essential health services.
Goal
To decrease illness and death in mothers, newborns, and children in urban slums of Bangladesh
Objectives
- Increase knowledge of individuals, households and community
- Increase skills and motivation of human resources to offer services at household and community levels
- Improve and strengthen referral system for management of complications
- Strengthen and sustain linkage with government, NGO and private health facilities
- Develop a supportive network to support communities and individual households to sustain services
- Facilitate scaling up of successful approaches
Manoshi envisages improvement in the health status of poor urban mothers, newborns and children by bringing healthcare services to their doorstep through our frontline Community Health Workers (CHWs). The shasthya shebikas and shasthyakormis provide antenatal and postnatal care, essential newborn care (ENC) and child health care. Through behaviour change communication interventions they motivate, educate and prepare expectant mothers for childbirth, highlighting an array of health issues including maternal and neonatal danger signs, maternal and neonatal nutrition and so on. BRAC Delivery Centres are established within slums to provide intra-natal care to mothers and immediate care to newborns. Emergency obstetric, neonatal and child health complications are referred to the hospital through an established referral system.The community is connected to health facilities via an innovative mobile phone based referral system. Manoshi is currently being implemented in eleven city corporations.
Manoshi Innovation:
m-Health (Mobile Health)
Currently piloted in the urban slums as Manoshi (MNCH Urban) Programme, the initiative intends to digitise the health services by collecting, recording and preserving household information. Thus it creates a real time virtual database. The database helps to speed up service delivery process to the target population.
