Educational Program

Over 80 percent of children with autism spectrum disorders live in low-and middle-income countries, posing challenges for the local health systems. Not addressing autism at a young age has a profound influence on development into adulthood and results in a high economic cost, exceeding the lifetime costs of asthma, intellectual disability and diabetes. India has about five million children with autism but, outside major cities, there are no services for diagnosis or community-based care available, due to low awareness and a shortage of mental health specialists.

The Friendship Bench Project is a task shifting mental health intervention delivered by lay health workers trained in screening and identification of common mental disorders. Supported by technological platforms such as ‘smart phones’ it has the potential of reaching out to millions of people needing public health services.

Depression is the most frequently encountered mental health disorder in Pakistan. Due to the stigma associated with mental health diseases, those who suffer often remain undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or untreated. There is an urgency to develop new interventions to increase early detection and treatment of mental illness, especially in the case of disease co-morbidity.

Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) delivered by a health worker in hospitals has shown to result in improved survival and breastfeeding of newborns. However, the coverage of KMC remains low as hospital care is not available to many families in low-resource settings.  The innovators want to introduce a new concept: Community Kangaroo Mother Care (CKMC), a low cost intervention delivered at home that can reach low-birth-weight babies in a sustainable way, babies who otherwise may have been neglected.

In India, like everywhere else, families affected by the addictions of their loved ones experience high levels of stress. SAFE aims to adapt and adjust the evidence-based supportive intervention, the Five Step Method, to make it acceptable, safe and feasible to be delivered by lay counsellors in developing countries.

“Women could give hands to prevent mental disorders” is an initiative designed by Trang Nguyen and managed by Research and Training Center for Community Development Vietnam. Positive deviance approach is carried out by the local Women’s Union to promote informal care with focuses on early detection, prevention and rehabilitation.

Household air pollution (HAP) from burning wood, charcoal, dung, agricultural waste and other solid biomass cooking fuels affects 2.7 billion people worldwide – 38% of humanity – and causes 4 million premature deaths a year.  That’s more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) combined.

Dr. Karen Yeates, Co-Director of the Office of Global Health at Queen’s University, will implement the Kilimanjaro Cervical Cancer Screening Project in Tanzania. The project aims to examine and evaluate a cost-effective method of screening for cervical cancer using a trained non-physician healthcare worker, mobile phone camera and text messaging.

Non-communicable diseases are rapidly increasing while HIV and reproductive health still remain major problems, posing complex health system challenges in Kenya. This model utilizes existing healthcare systems to cost-effectively provide primary care for all these diseases in rural Kenya.

‘VISHWAS’ is a model of physician leadership that will place family physicians in the heart of communities, and prepare them to be agents of social change by immersing them in a multidisciplinary experiential learning and leadership program. Physician leaders operating from Vishwas community centers, will provide leadership for a variety of community health programs. Click HERE to Download the photo below. [caption id=""attachment_7981"align=""aligncenter"width=""450"caption=""Dr.