What every health worker, family and community has a right to know.
The uncomfortable reality is that we live in a world where there is a Silent
emergency every day: 21,000 children will die from preventable causes today.
1,000 women will die from pregnancy-related causes today. This year, 4
million newborns worldwide will die in the first month of life.
The silent killers that will take away their lives are poverty, hunger,
easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and related causes. Almost 90% of
all child deaths are attributable to just six conditions: neonatal causes,
pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of excellent projects, aimed at these killers,
are being implemented in both rural and urban parts of the world. Some serve
a village, while others serve a group of villages, a town, a city, a taluka,
a block or a district. Yet few projects are implemented state-wide and even
fewer nationwide.
Why is that? A key factor is capacity-building and scaling-up.
Health education has to be one of the most effective ways to reduce maternal
and child mortality, those preventable deaths that we never seem to manage
to prevent. We need to deliver vital messages and information for mothers,
fathers, siblings, caregivers and communities to use in changing behaviour
and practices: messages that can save and protect the lives of children and
help them grow and develop to their full potential.
For the illiterate, currently their only source of information is probably
going to be the people around them, who are also, in many cases, illiterate.
With the continuous rapid growth in population and shrinking budgets,
governments are finding it increasingly difficult, and expensive, to
effectively manage programmes and efforts that involve training and
educating their large numbers of departments and staff. This is leaving
health workers, and by extension, families and communities ignorant of the
basic knowledge that could help prevent diseases and improve the quality of
health of their families and communities.
The First Mile Now Reachable
The mobile phone has made connection possible in ways that were truly
unthinkable until very recently. And it has stoked the desire of people to
be connected. Take India for example: with a population of 1.2 billion and
a wireless user base of about 866 million (Aug. 2011), and growing at the
rate of 15 to 20 million a month. "Cell Phone penetration will reach 97% by
2014", according to a recent study. Soon, almost everybody will have one!
This is a game-changer for capacity-building and scaling up. It means we can
reach the excluded, the illiterate, all those women, men and children who
were only visible in tragic statistics. We can reach families and
communities as a whole - something we've never really been able to do before.
Empowering, Teaching, Reaching and Changing Behaviour
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million!
While many successful projects have been developed to use mobile phones in
various settings to transmit messages – encouraging people to come to health
centres for check ups, reminders to take medication, and public health
campaigns – the HealthPhone™ is an innovative leap forward. HealthPhone™
provides families with their own personal reference library and guide to
better health practices. Available in real time, right to those who need it,
when they need it and when a health problem is about to strike, where they are, and as they are.
Diarrhoea
When a child has diarrhoea, the video clip about how to mix a simple oral
rehydration solution (ORS) can mean the difference between the child living
and dying. Diarrhoea kills an estimated 1.5 million children each year.
Inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhoea exist, but in developing
countries only 39 per cent of children with diarrhoea receive the
recommended treatment. Use of ORS has been shown to decrease millions of
deaths from dehydration caused by diarrhoea.
Malaria
When the malaria season approaches, the video clip about bed nets and how to
deal with fevers can help prevent the death of children and prevent
complications in women who are pregnant. One million deaths a year – most of
them children under five in Africa, can be prevented as the result of using
mosquito nets and appropriate diagnosis and treatment of fevers. In fact, on
average a child in Africa dies every 30 seconds from a malaria infection
caused by the bite of a mosquito.
Pneumonia
When persistent coughs and colds are disrupting children's sleep, the video
clip and audio information will provide a step by step guide on what to
check for, how to treat and how to ensure that a serious case of pneumonia
does not set in. Pneumonia is the biggest cause of child deaths in the
world, killing 1.8 million children under five years of age every year, more
than 98% of which occur in 68 developing countries. Early intervention to
treat coughs can lead to decrease in cases of pneumonia among children,
preventing millions of deaths a year.
Preloaded Content on Low-Cost Mobile Phones and on the Cloud!
Watch Videos:
HealthPhone™ Introduction
TEDx Talk - HealthPhone™: The First Mile Now Reachable
HealthPhone™ wins mBillionth Award, Most Promising Nomination for 2011
HealthPhone™'s health and nutrition content is scripted on knowledge prepared jointly by UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNDP, UNAIDS, WFP and The World Bank. It addresses the main areas of concern;
Timing Births,
Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health,
Child Development and Early Learning,
Breastfeeding,
Nutrition and Growth,
Immunization,
Diarrhoea,
Coughs Colds and More Serious Illnesses,
Hygiene,
Malaria,
HIV,
Child Protection,
Injury Prevention,
Emergencies: preparedness and response.
This content will be pre-loaded on popular low-cost models of mobile phones – no signal is required, nor cost to download videos and other media. Users choose what they want to watch and listen to and when, wherever they happen to be.
Pilot content in English and 15 Indian Languages: Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
HealthPhone™ is coming soon to a village, town, city, slum, block, district, state, province, country near you!
