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Healthwise Provides Answers
to Questions About Child Survival
and other Health Issues
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 CHILD SURVIVAL INFORMATION
Selected Highlights of HCP's Child Survival Activities
Resources | Ethiopia | Zambia | Global Efforts | Safe Drinking Water
The report Why Invest in Communication for Immunization? Evidence and Lessons Learned by Silvio Waisbord and Heidi J. Larson, a joint venture between UNICEF and HCP, makes a convincing case for revitalizing investments in communication for immunization. The document identifies communication challenges, offers evidence of the impact of communication activities and identifies important lessons learned. Three thousand copies of the document have been sent to AED and UNICEF for distribution to their partners, and the document can be downloaded from the HCP website or ordered from HCP in hard copy. Why Invest in Communication for Immunization explains that strategic communication is used in a variety of ways to raise immunization rates, including advocacy efforts with local governments, community mobilization to boost participation, and behavior change initiatives to encourage compliance with vaccination schedules. The report details success stories that demonstrate the power of communication in meeting immunization goals. Eleven overarching recommendations are included:
- Earmark adequate funding for communication activities
- Make strategic communication plans a requirement within immunization proposals
- Offer incentives and rewards to national plans that assign above-average resources for communication positions and activities
- Identify key gaps in communication capacity and fund raising and capacity-building programs as well as communication positions at regional and national levels
- Provide technical guidance to immunization managers to design and budget communication plans
- Support baseline and evaluation studies to guide communication interventions
- Fund and offer technical assistance for advocacy activities to support the introduction of under-used and new vaccines
- Fund programs to monitor and document effective use of interpersonal communication, and training of frontline health workers.
- With MOH, implement selective reward programs for health staff in districts where caregivers are highly knowledgeable about vaccines and immunization schedules.
- Collaborate with other stakeholders to develop communication strategies
- Contribute to setting up and sustaining immunization coalitions with relevant health organizations, communities, and opinion leaders
Healthwise
Healthwise is produced to support health communication personnel, who do not necessarily have a clinical background, but are working in public health programs addressing infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria and HIV/AIDS. Healthwise summarizes, in an easy-to-use format, answers to questions related to the medical aspects of health problems. As such it updates communication experts on the latest standards and guidelines for disease management. The initial six months of Healthwise issues have been a “pilot phase” to test the production process, assess relevancy and usefulness of information and correct any technological problems associated with posting Healthwise on the web or issuing it electronically. .During the pilot phase HCP limited the distribution of Healthwise to HCP and INFO staff. Topics covered included: Co-infection with HIV/AIDS and malaria; Preventing Neonatal Death; What is colostrum and how does it benefit the newborn?; How can one tell if a child's common cold has developed into pneumonia?; Why is hand washing important? What danger signs call for the immediate referral of a sick child for urgent medical care?; What is the role of Zinc supplementation in the clinical management of childhood diarrhea?; What are the health risks of getting malaria while pregnant?
The paper Behavior Change Perspectives and Guidelines on Six Child Survival Interventions by Renata Seidel of AED was made available via the HCP website. The document is directed to technicians who want to incorporate behavior change strategies in their child survival programs and focuses on the key practices associated with child health learned from work in developing countries. UNICEF has offered to publish Behavior Change Perspectives.
Family Health Card: This fundamental child survival tool directly links parents and healthcare workers. The Family Health Card is the primary health record and communication material that mothers carry back and forth from their home to the health center, over a period of up to five years.
BCC Message Guide: A Child Survival message guide was produced in collaboration with the MOH and over twenty health partners.
Improving the profile of child health: During the recent Child Health Week, HCP reprinted and distributed 36,000 posters on vitamin A, immunization, malaria, growth monitoring and maternal and neonatal health countrywide. HCP also facilitated the production and airing of four different child health spots in eight languages on national television and radio, which MOH acclaimed and included still shots on their website. Through the provincial and district offices, HCP worked with the DHMTs to ensure that the logistics for the Child Health Week exercise were distributed to the health centers.
HCP has contributed to the global effort to involve private sector in child health: HCP has participated in a multi-agency Forum for involving the private sector in child health programs. The Forum includes USAID, WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank. It aims to introduce strategies to increase the contribution of the private sector, including private commercial sector, private providers and NGOs to achieving child survival goals at the country level.
Access to Safe Drinking Water: To respond the challenges created by a lack of access to safe water, HCP led the Safe Drinking Water Alliance to test different models intended to increase the use of point-of-use water treatment technologies and create favorable conditions for a sustained behavior for water treatment and adequate storage. The main beneficiaries of the project were poor families with small children that do not have access to safe water. Project results are being analyzed and a final report on cost effectiveness of the proposed interventions, behaviors associated with water treatment rejection or adoption and intended audiences' relationship with new technologies such as PuR will be released soon.
Contributed to developing global strategy for Community Case Management (CCM) of Child Illness: HCP participated in a multi-agency effort, including USAID, WHO, UNICEF and the NGO community, to develop a strategy to promote the expansion of quality community case management of child illness. This initiative has been initiated based on most recent understanding of health care seeking behavior for childhood illness that shows that most case management of child illness takes place at the community level. The strategy for scaling up CCM takes into consideration the results of early experience in community treatment of child pneumonia in Nepal.
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