Organised health programmes
Consider the points below for what benefits there are in planning a local and targeted health care strategy.
- Focus on preventative healthcare because it is easier and more cost-effective than trying to cure a person once they have contracted a disease.
- Vaccination Programmes to immunise against preventable diseases like polio are estimated by the World Health Organisation to save between 2 and 3 million lives each year.
- Educate people about how to prevent diseases spreading e.g. by using mosquito nets to prevent Malaria.
- Use village meetings, plays and songs to pass on health education messages. These methods are effective in places where a written leaflet or poster would be of limited use due to low literacy rates.
Small-scale health projects such as pit latrines and water pumps can be effective because they:
- Provide local people with training and skills, which can help them to improve their standard of living in different ways.
- Use local labour and building materials, which reduces the cost.
- Gain faster acceptance and usage in the local community because local facilitators organise the projects.
Local Health Workers have been particularly effective because:
- Individuals were chosen by members of their village to be trained to a basic level of health care, which means the community trusts them.
- Health workers speak the local dialect, so communication is not a barrier to treatment.
- It is very difficult to ensure that every village has access to a fully trained doctor or health centre/hospital in countries with large rural areas.
The use of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) has been particularly effective because:
- Clean water, sugar and salt help to replace fluids and treat dehydration.
- It saves lives: the World Health Organisation estimates that ORT saves about 1 million babies each year in developing countries.
- It is an easy, cheap and effective method of treating dehydration through diarrhoea.
