CORE Group Community Health Workshop
Jamkhed, India

January 31-Feburary 8, 2012

Stay Tuned: Videos and Photos to come!

At CORE Group we strive to generate collaborative action and learning to advance community health worldwide.  We do this by bringing together our dynamic network of practioners, scholars, donors, and advocates to learn from one another about best practices, challenges, and successes in the field of community health. This year, to meet the professional development and learning needs of our community, we launched the annual Practioner Academy Community Health Workshop. This workshop is designed to bring together public health professionals from all over the world to spend a week visiting and learning from a successful community health project. For our first site, we selected the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), founded in 1970 by Drs. Raj and Mabelle Arole. With the community always mind, CRHP pioneered the principles of comprehensive, community-based primary care. Communities are encouraged to take health into their own hands through the support of the Village Health Workers (VHWs), community groups such as women’s groups, farmers groups, and adolescent groups, and the mobile health outreach team and CRHP hospital and training center.

Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP)/Jamkhed

At the outset of the program, levels of poverty and ill-health were among the worst in the world. Infant mortality was 176 per 1000, and 40% of under-5 children were undernourished and coverage of MNCH services was less than 1%. Within five years the infant mortality rate was 52 per 1000, 82% of women received ANC, 74% of deliveries were “safe”.1 At present, 100% of women receive ANC care and have safe deliveries, less than 1% of children are malnourished and the infant mortality rate is 20 deaths per 1000 live births (2010).

However, the impact is broader than physical health. From the beginning, CRHP addressed broad community concerns such as the low-status of women, the caste system, poverty, traditional beliefs, agricultural production, watershed development and appropriate technology. Tackling the social determinants of health and empowering the whole community is key to their success, and central to the model. To learn more about CRHP, please visit http://www.crhpjamkhed.org

Lessons Learned

Learning Sites for Scale Up: Lessons from CRHP/Jamkhed