Reaching health to the unreachable: Mobile medical teams and partnerships

Background: The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is recognized as one of the most disadvantaged and isolated areas in Bangladesh, with hilly and remote terrain, a lack of communication, infrastructure, ethnic diversity, settlement patterns and a history of internal conflict.  The CHT covers 5,089 square miles and has a population of about 1.3 million people with about two thirds of the population lacking access to basic health care services.  UNDP initiated a Health Pilot Initiative in the CHT to improve the overall health situation of the hard-to-reach people in the region.

Objectives: The overall objective of the Initiative was to improve the health and nutrition status of the people in the CHT.  This includes improving maternal health, reducing child mortality and, reducing the incidence of malaria, tuberculosis and, other priority communicable diseases. 

Methodology: UNDP initiated Mobile Medical Teams, Community Health Workers and built partnership with actors in health. The Initiative built its approach from the bottom up, by supporting the development of a network of female village-based health workers. Outreach satellite clinics by mobile health teams and joint collaboration programmes were organized with the Government, NGOs, UN and private organizations.

Results: The project helped to increase the immunization coverage of children below one year from 35% to more than 68%. Maternal deaths and child deaths recorded was lowest in a year compared to the averages of last 10 years. The CPR increased to 85% comparing to 54% achieved last year. 3780 cases of fatal malaria were treated reducing significantly malarial deaths.

Conclusions and Lessons Learnt:   Capacity building of Governments and NGO’s are important to achieve desired results. Providing logistics support to Government Health staffs helped to increase program effectiveness. Health Structures of a partner organization was utilized by another organization thus pooling of resources and maximizing utilization of resources and services.