APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY
Healing Fields will scale the training of health leaders within the community through an e-learning platform and a mentor and trainer program, the recipients of which will in turn develop health groups in their villages. The health leaders will be trained in health education and health financing methods. They will also learn to form groups for health education, savings, loans and health insurance. The concept of health savings group is being developed as most of the women already understand the concept of savings,risk pooling, and insurance. Healing Fields will also build health loan sysytems that will include facilitation and negotiated discounted services at the hospitals to ensure quality care is being provided at affordable costs.
The main objective of the comitment is to make quality healthcare accessible and affordable to the poor and to ensure that the community does not go into a downward spiral of debts that result from a lack of health financing. The prevention work will ensure fewer common illnesses and thereby lower health costs and health savings will ensure that people learn to save for health and ensure timely payments.
Healing Fields would like to extend both health education and financing services to over 1,200,000 households by end of 2016.
IMPLEMENTATION, TIMELINE, AND DELIVERABLES
Please find attached the implementation plan in attached file - CGI 2010 Plan
Deliverables:
1. 4912 Community Health Leaders will be trained. To date, 512 CHLs have been trained. An additional 4400 will be trained from 2012-2016.
2. During the first stage of the commitment (2010-12), the trained health leaders reached out to 128,000 families through health education and disease-prevention work. From 2012-16, an additional 1,100,000 families will be reached.
3. 165 pilot health savings groups have been formed, with 16,000 people accessing health savings. By 2016, it is projected that 52,800 health savings groups will be formed, with approximately 1,056,000 families having access to health savings.
4. Technology development for E learning & Mobile surveys for Health Education programs.
5. Microenterprise activities will reach over 1,000,000 women by providing access to sanitary products and 40,000 households by providing renewable energy/water purification solutions.
According to the world bank, 70% of common illnesses that require hospitalization are preventable through basic health education, sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, and the provision of affordable health financing services. The poor in India do not have access to affordable, quality healthcare or adequate health financing. Instead of using government programs which often do not reach them, the poor use costly debt mechanisms to finance their healthcare. As a result, the World Bank reports that 20% of the population of India falls below the poverty line after one incident of hospitalization. The Healing Fields Foundation is creating innovative ways of addressing these problems by developing a relevant and efficient health education & financing model to intervene and stop the downward spiral of poverty, while empowering women at the grassroots level to take responsibility for the health of their families and communities.
Considering our scale up and program growth plans we need support for partnerships both to scale with more implementing partners and also for livelihood opportunities for the trained women.
We need financial resources to pilot new models and innovate and improve the existing program. We also plan to conduct third party evaluation of the program periodically and need funding for this.
Healing Fields has gained expertise in developing and implementing health education and health financing programs at the grassroots. We also have expertise in the area of research and program evaluations. Our current programs have been developed on an understanding of the community needs and we have been constantly innovating the programs to make them more need based and effective. We would be happy to provide this expertise and best practices support to other organizations implementing similar programs.
