The COVID pandemic underlined the importance of well-functioning public health services. Although public health services are chronically underfunded and understaffed, poor and marginalised people depend critically on them. In the post-pandemic recovery period, nationally and globally, there is a renewed call with urgency to invest and improve public services without further delay. On this background, SATHI’s perspective to improve public health services by enabling local communities, particularly marginalised sections, to create inclusive mechanisms for dialogue between communities and public health functionaries while deepening the accountability culture is valuable. So, SATHI is activating institutionally mandated participatory forums to enable communities to access improved health services.
Objectives
Establish and activate participatory forums in rural/ tribal blocks of Maharashtra, as mandated by the government. These forums enhance communities’ access to primary healthcare services and schemes.
To establish, activate, and strengthen participatory forums in urban areas in specific urban wards of Pune City, to increase access of communities in healthcare services.
SATHI focuses on specific rural and urban health institutions and processes to enhance access to health services. The organization has initiated community-level dialogues between health functionaries and the public, with the goal of highlighting community perceptions of health services in meetings with health officials.
Objectives
This grant is to amplify accountability issues in the private and corporate health sectors, and specific to SRHR, at the national and the South Asia regional levels.
Objectives
Strengthening access to maternal and child health nutrition services in the tribal area of four districts of Maharashtra by empowering local community, thereby improving ANC, PNC care and reducing malnutrition.
Objectives
This project empowers pregnant and lactating women by improving awareness about public health and nutrition services, and increasing access to these services through local interventions.
To enable this, a project orientation workshop was conducted for officers and other community level stakeholders to enlist their involvement in the project including frontline service providers ANM, Anaganwadi, and ASHA workers, in the selected slum areas.
Beneficiary groups include pregnant and lactating women, and their relatives or family members. Beneficiaries receive awareness and training about available health and nutrition services, role of different stakeholders who can assist with access to healthcare services, and relevant forms for applying to entitled scheme benefits. Training and awareness raising also include visits by beneficiary groups to nearest PMC health centre and local Anganwadi centre, to understand the actual services and schemes. Other community awareness campaigns include enhanced awareness of health and nutrition services, available schemes, vaccination and anaemia campaign, ANC/PNC services, breast feeding practices, best food and recipe practices, and food demonstrations.
Monthly meetings with beneficiary groups help to track health and nutrition services they are availing, and contribute to improving regular ANC and PNC services.
Expected Outcomes
While pandemic-related academic and epidemiological research is abundant, there is undoubtedly a dearth of narrative analysis that captures people’s stories. Almost every house in India has a Covid – 19 story to tell. These stories are predominantly about who died, who was exploited in the hospital, who took a bribe, and who can help get a vaccine; a mind boggling variety of distress experiences.
Predictably, the massive state machinery is out to control the narrative, and hide its abject failure in protecting citizens. The contestation is to fix the meaning of the pandemic experience. We at SATHI, believe this is an opportune time to work on health narratives, to enhance the effectiveness of our work on transparency, accountability and governance. We endeavour to combine extended individual monologues related to experiences of seeking health care during the pandemic, and create a collage of voices to puncture the dominant narrative that abdicates the government of gross neglect.
We seek to work on equitable health systems for the post-Covid world, using narrative strategies to change discourse on universal health care, for strengthening public healthcare, and regulating the private health sector.
Three broad objectives