Community Health & Village Health Promoters
Moses is a volunteer Village Health Promoter (VHP) working together with Bwindi Community Hospital. This is a pioneering project where knowledge and skills about health are shared with every village and household in the Bwindi area. He is one of two hundred VHP’s trained by Bwindi Community Hospital, easily recognisable by his green t-shirt and his positive attitude towards helping his community. Moses represents his village of Mukongoro, which is a poor community high in the hills above the Hospital. On two or three days each month Moses attends workshops led by the Hospital to learn about different aspects of health, and takes the knowledge that he learns back to Mukongoro where he shares it with every household. He believes that improving health begins in the home, and wants everyone in his area to take their share of responsibility in improving the overall health of their family and their
The Problem
Malaria has always been the biggest killer in the Bwindi area, and is easily preventable simply by sleeping under a mosquito net. Many people still suffer from diarrhoea because they don’t know enough about how to access clean water, and families go hungry because they don’t have the knowledge and skills to be able to grow and prepare a balanced diet. Many children with malnutrition and adults with tuberculosis go undiagnosed in the community because of a lack of screening.
Our Services
The Hospital has trained a Village Health Promoter like Moses for every one of the 200 villages in the Bwindi area. Each month VHP’s are trained in a different activity, and they conduct teaching and screening in the community on behalf of the Hospital. To prevent malnutrition they teach every household how to grow and cook a balanced diet, and we give them a list of all the children in their village and teach them to check them every three months for signs of malnutrition, referring children to the Hospital if necessary. For each of our priority areas we have simple interventions:
Malnutrition:
Sanitation:
Family Planning:
Disability:
Tuberculosis:
Safe Water:
Nutrition teaching sessions and malnutrition screening
Home improvement competitions
Educational sessions and mobile dispensing services
Identification and referral to Hospital
Screening and referral to Hospital
Teaching on water boiling and collection
Our community health team travels into the area surrounding the Hospital three days each week to talk with community members and teach them the skills they need in order to look after their own health and the health of their families. The community team, along with our Village Health Promoters, form the core of our prevention strategy in combating preventable diseases in the
area.
How you can help
The Hospital and community members have worked together to develop a comprehensive plan for improving the health of the community. We have an army of motivated volunteers, a computerised database that includes every household, we record carefully all of the activities that we undertake and are implementing simple evidence-based solutions to basic health problems. We even conduct a household survey every year to measure the benefits of our work. But we have no significant funding for this program, which costs around $150,000 to implement each year. Any contribution, however large or small, will go directly to helping those most in need.
