Stories From Health Workers: Bargaining for Public Health
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Planet Care
801 Cedar Street
Suite 200
Berkeley, CA 94710
510-594-4027
info@planetcare.org
Medics at this clinic came up with a creative way to combat malnutrition -- they distribute protein-rich yellow beans to pregnant mothers.Attempting "Public Health" under normal circumstances is a challenge -- never mind attempting it in areas affected by prolonged conflict. On the borders of Thailand and Burma, for the mostly young men of the Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT) who serve internally displaced Burmese refugees, the battles of "Public Health" versus "Medicine" is very much alive. How does one sell important Public Health concepts such as breast feeding, hygiene, sanitation, latrine use, Oral re-hydration therapy, community gardening and nutrition, just to name a few, in the midst of the more glamorous and dramatic curative and medical treatment practices like limb amputation, gun shot wound management, or malaria treatment?
Take a minute and think: to whom you would most likely listen? Would it be to that man in the corner, however charismatic he may be, telling you to use a latrine, dig a well, wash your hands? Or would it be to the medic who just a month ago performed a life saving amputation, treated your child for cerebral malaria, and gave your sister blood transfusion? How do these young men of the BPHWT and its leaders convince farmers, teachers, mothers, fathers and grandmothers of their own responsibilities and power over their own health: that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?
It'd hardly a new idea or concept, but what the BPHWT have learned is that the pills they carry can indirectly serve as powerful bargaining tools for improvements in public health. So, while using their skills and pills to prevent malaria death, cure pneumonia, or dose out de-worming medicine (decreases anemia, chronic malnutrition, growth retardation and increases cognitive development) or provide drops of Vitamin A (decreases infant mortality by 25-30%), they also educate the villagers about breast feeding, birth control and child spacing, about oral re-hydration for diarrhea, hygiene and nutrition, about HIV and a score of other public health measures that pave the way for long term improvements in the health of the population and ultimately give the power and responsibility of health back to the people. As one of our favorite border Philosophers, tireless Public Health advocate, and leader of the BPHWT would say, health has to be "bottom up," not "top down".
-- Nurse Practitioner and GHAP co-founder Anusha Dahanayake
Copyright Planet Care
