Help 24x7 runs health camps around Chennai and Rural areas in Tamil Nadu. Each week from 200 to 250 patients attending these camps.

Meeting health care challenges

Poverty is the root cause of poor health in rural semi-arid India. From poverty stems the health problems faced by the local population:

• Lack of health education
• Malnutrition
• Poor hygiene
• High rates of cervical cancer
• Malaria
• TB
• Illegal practice of quacks and profit motivated unqualified doctors
• Corruption in government immunisation programmes

How Help 24x7 Camps are tackling ill health

• Health care and nutrition education through the clinics and the community
• Strong focus on women’s health including visual inspection of the cervix to detect cervical cancer and treatment of common gynaecological problems
• Continual training of staff and development of clinic facilities
• Monitoring government immunisation programmes
• Discouraging the use of quacks and unqualified doctors and lobbying local authorities to clamp down on their practice
• Promoting the camps to a wide area.

Continuing Challenges

A key barrier to developing better health care though the Help 24x7 village clinics is financial. More resources would allow the clinics to employ more staff and provide better facilities.

The camp organizers, volunteer doctors and the Institute’s city-based personnel are striving to deliver better patient care to poor rural communities in many ways:

• Improving diagnosis rates
• Building a women’s health care centre
• Conducting a wider variety of lab tests so that the clinics can diagnose and treat more patients locally
• Developing health education including school visits and drama groups (especially in the fields of reproduction, HIV, hygiene, and nutrition)
• Working with remote tribal communities in training health care workers.
• Refining the model of the Help 24x7 village clinics to allow other NGOs to implement health care projects in rural areas with scarce medical resources.