An effective community healthcare project will work only when one’s own knowledge meets with the existing health problems of the community. It is important to identify community health problems and list them out. Mostly referred to as mapping of diseases, there are various participatory research tools that can help us in gathering information about the prevailing health problems. Since as NGOs we have poor access to such professional tools and with our constrained resources, the approach will also remain limited at least initially.
One of the basic ways of identifying health problems is visiting the households of targeted communities and discussing with them about prevailing diseases. If the community is not aware about the disease, discuss and note down the symptoms in them. Since this is going to be an entrepreneurship project, it is important to collect information about the income of the household. This short survey will also help in mouth-to-mouth marketing of your organization’s upcoming healthcare services.
After gathering all the information, arrange a meeting with the local doctor and discuss the symptoms and diseases you have found. Also refer to the book, Where there is no doctor, which offers all the guidelines on how to take care of people with different diseases.
The research should also identify the targeted area for which the services will be rendered. Initially, the organization may not be able to provide services to the entire community. Since this will be a pilot experiment, choose a small cluster of villages for this service.
