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BHILS Health Initiative in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh

New Collaboration

September 22, 2009 - India

Caitlin McQuilling

Our best NGO friend in Jhabua, the BHILS Health Initiative, has agreed to share its medical staff with RMF and to collaborate on nutrition in the villages in which they work.

The BHILS Health Initiative currently covers 22 villages in Jhabua in a holistic health intervention in which they visit the villages twice a month, screen for illness in all inhabitants and pay special attention to adolecent girls, pregnant and lactating mothers, and children under 5 years old. They are already screening for malnutrition and have in the past been providing nutritional supplements to children with moderate acute malnutrition. The BHILS villages in have incredibly better health outcomes than neighboring villages where they don’t work. You can tell a BHIL village as soon as you walk in by the cleanliness of the village, the more advanced sanitation systems, and the plumper children running around.

With this new collaboration BHILS will do more intensive nutrition counseling in the villages in which they work and they will also lend their 10 staff members to RMF twice a week to do malnutrition work in neighboring RMF villages.

To begin this collaboration, today the RMF-BHILS field medical team went in for a training at the Nutrition Rehabilitation Center (NRC) in Jhabua. Heena, the wonderful nutritionist who runs the center offered to walk our staff through NRC admission criteria, malnutrition identification, and the services offered at the NRC so that our staff will be ready to counsel the parents of severely malnourished children to bring their children to the NRCs for treatment.

We’re greatful to the BHILS Initiative for helping us enlarge our team and greatful to the Jhabua NRC staff for helping us continue to improve our work!

Training at the NRC