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Local Councils and Community Health Associations

Community health care is a system of health care based in the target community which integrates the concepts of health promotion and maintenance, disease prevention, health restoration and rehabilitation. The state of medical care and environmental conditions are far from being satisfactory in our communities. The prevention of disease through community care is often neglected. The neglect of communities in health care allows the persistence of inaccurate or even dangerous ideas about disease and so permits disease to be unrecognized and unchecked. Good health is the prerequisite for any meaningful development. Informing and educating the community on preventive medicine can play a great role in improving birth rates, reducing death rates, improving water supply, making possible better sanitation, ensuring better nutrition, introducing immunization campaigns and spreading out community health workers to carry out health education on the effectiveness of medical beliefs and practices. For a community to enjoy better health status, there must be a partnership based on solidarity between local community entities within Local Council Areas( Village Communities, Neighbourhood Communities, Educational Communities, Workplace Communities, Faith based Communities, Socially linked Communities, Economically linked Communities, and Professionally linked Communities) and Local Council and Health Authorities. The creation of Community Health Associations (CHAs) goes an extra mile to mobilize and motivate people to do something to improve health care in their communities, and be encouraged to mobilize the required human and material resources to do so. It is a process of assisting people to: become aware of their community and take an in-depth look at it, identify the perceived as well as the real needs, have a belief or faith that something can be done to meet these needs and that most of the resources to achieve these are within the competence of the community, and possess a desire and willingness to use such resources to ensure the continued existence and improvement of their community. Local Council and Health District Authorities can work together with CHAs to promote health development and improve the living environment and conditions of the population, encourage the participation of all active forces in the promotion of collective welfare and encourage mutually beneficiary partnership at all levels. Global Health Dialogue aims at facilitating and encouraging the carrying out of activities by creating dialogue structures within the health and health related sectors geared towards the improvement of the health status of the population. As a facilitating institution, GHD intends to lobby for Local Councils to endorse health development projects so that through them funds can be raised to kick start and implement health and development programmes through Community Health and Development Associations.

Establishing Community Organisations to Promote Better Health

Global Health Dialogue argues that health outcomes can be improved by developing the capability locally to share information, knowledge and best practice within the community. We believe that the building of such capability can be accelerated by the creation of local community groups and are working locally here in Buea, Cameroon to help develop such an organization. We are also working in partnership with local schools to identify ways in which they can focus on health. In the near future we will be providing more detail of these individual projects which may act as demonstration projects for other localities as we learn from developing them. This week on www.globalhealthdialogue.org we are focusing on our work with local communities to help them build an agenda for positive change. The link below provides a summary of the generic issues which we feel local communities should consider tackling. It is intended to provide a menu of issues for consideration from which local groups can decide what are the most pressing issues that need to be tackled.

(Posted on :Sunday, 26/12/2010 (12h:01 PM))