Capacity Building of Village Health and Sanitation Committees
Jan Swaasthya Abhiyan (JSA), Gujarat, had taken a lead in conceptualizing the plan of action for Community Based Monitoring of health services through Village Health and Sanitation Committees (VHSC) to ensure quality health care services in the villages.
The GoG positively responded to that plan of action by signing a MoU with FRHS, nodal agency for the JSA, to undertake training and capacity building of VHSC to help them play their envisaged role under the NRHM. FRHS implemented this pilot in collaboration with 25 NGO, who shared the responsibility of training and mentoring about 3500 VHSC all over Gujarat, in one year.
Under this project, Government of India’s VHSC training modules was adapted to Gujarat situation, over 170 facilitators were trained as trainers cum mentors of VHSC members; over 17,000 VHSC members were trained for 3 days in responsibilities and management of VHSC, and over 3000 VHSC were provided mentoring support during their quarterly meeting over one year. Recently, FRHS completed an impact evaluation of the training on the functioning of randomly selected 50 VHSC each from the trained and untrained groups. The trained VHSC showed significantly better performance on utilization of VHSC funds, maintaining registers and records; and participation in government health activities though both the groups reported holding similar number of VHSC meetings. The trained VHSC were using the quarterly meeting mechanism more effectively than the non-trained VHSC. GoG has decided to expand this training to additional 2500 VHSCs in year 2011-12.
|
|
|
| Villagehead Reading VHSC Training Program | ASHA Reading Guidelines book for VHSC Members | Training at Linch PHC |
Funding Source: State Health Society-Government of Gujarat
