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Prajnopaya Foundation has a new "virtual" home- http://care.prajnopaya.org

Prajnopaya's Project Aahan – Community-based Tuberculosis Treatment

In June 2010, Prajnopaya, in partnership with Innovators in Health (IIH), launched a new pilot TB control program for the Samastipur district of Bihar, India. The program aims to revolutionize TB control throughout the state by coupling effective management practices with enabling technology to address major challenges in TB case detection, diagnosis and treatment. We work with the publicly funded TB program by locating new patients, coordinating their diagnosis and delivering TB medicine. The pilot program currently serves a population of 75,000 across 30 villages, with 10 full-time local staff and 30 community health workers supporting case detection and treatment.

Between May 2010 and November 2011, Aahan has cured 76 patients with another 99 undergoing treatment. During the entire year prior to the start of Aahan, only 8 patients received treatment from the public TB program in this region. Aahan has already made a significant impact on the number of people with access to quality care.

Our successful approach has been recognized through a grant received by the Global Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore. Our project received the award for our efforts to address the complex problem of detecting and treating TB patients in a rural setting through a mix of organizational innovations and systems-based modeling. We continue to emphasize the importance of not only developing and testing new ideas, but also translating them into public health policy by engaging with public health stakeholders from the outset.

The objectives behind the creation of the Aahan TB program were ambitious, yet simple: to achieve drastic improvements in TB care for the poor and to work with the Indian national TB program to incorporate lessons we learned into national TB policy. As we continue to work on these overarching goals, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to be making another positive impact – one that wasn’t planned, but is no less significant. Through training and employing a dedicated group of Aahan staff who were recruited from the villages, we have re-ignited a sense of possibility and self-confidence in these important individuals.

Employment continues to be a major challenge in Bihar, and we are flooded with strong candidates every time we advertise an opening. Ranjeet Kumar, one of our staff, has explained that more than money, the program has allowed him to regain his dignity. Aahan staff are widely respected in the community, and Ranjeet was recently elected as the representative of his municipal ward of about 1000 residents. We've learnt in Aahan that capacity building is not training people in TB, but training them in problem solving and restoring their sense of possibility and control over the community's fate. Through guidance and experience, these individuals become leaders and caretakers for the community and are the real key behind a sustainable transformation.

- Dr. Manish Bhardwaj, CEO & Co-Founder, Innovators in Health

Upaya Care

Primary care clinics are nonexistent for much of the poor rural population in Bihar. Prajnopaya has been running two small primary care clinics in the rural villages of Rajgir and Vaishali to provide free basic medical services to the local community. From this work, we have gained valuable knowledge of primary care needs and we are now moving to support the establishment of new pay-for-service clinics that will sustainably provide much needed care to a broader population.

Our Upaya Care clinics will now follow a “hub and spoke” model, with hub clinics centrally located in densely populated areas providing primary diagnostic and treatment services to a mixed income population. In some cases, the clinics will also provide services for mother-child care and TB treatment. Each hub clinic supports several spoke clinics that are distributed among primarily poor communities. At spoke clinics, service is provided by community health workers and, as needed, diagnostics and physician care is provided through referral to the hub clinic. This flexible model allows us to reach a much broader population and to support the recurring costs of care across a diverse patient base. Initial start-up and expansion costs will be supported by external financial contributions.

Goals for 2012

Our goals for the coming year will continue to emphasize our focus on Aahan and Upaya Care. We hope to expand the community served by the Aahan TB program from its current size of 75,000 to 150,000. And, importantly, we will further increase the engagement with the state and national TB control programs and set the stage for influencing policy. For Upaya Care, we hope to establish and start the operation of two hub-and-spoke clinics for communities in Rajgir, Bihar and Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh. We will be creating our first footprints in what we hope will spread and flourish to meet this great need.

Public Service Program at Central University for Tibetan Studies, India

Photo: Some Members of the Transformative Leadership Program with HH The Dalai Lama in Varanasi, India.

Prajnopaya is pleased to join The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT and the Foundation for Universal Responsibility to encourage social entrepreneurship by developing an innovative leadership program. The Transformative Leadership program, initiated at the Central University for Tibetan Studies (CUTS) in Sarnath, India, is training more than 98 young student leaders from India, Nepal, Mustang, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia to become agents of change. These students, who are primarily from backgrounds in Liberal Arts or Tibetan Medicine, have been developing sustainable models to effectively combat social menaces such illiteracy and the lack of health care. These pilot programs are run in the neighboring slums in Varanasi and will later expand to the communities from which these young leaders originate. Few examples of the community based projects are:

Environmental Awareness: A drive to get rid of plastic use in Sarnath (Varanasi) which is escalated by tourism. Placing waste baskets around CUTS and neighboring areas. Planting trees in large scale.
Group Nirvana: Aiding slum-dwellers in health and hygiene awareness. Distribution of blankets, clothes, and medicine.
Compassion Group: Aids injured animals on the streets.

Seed Funds for the student projects and the leadership program have been crucial in inspiring determination and innovation among these dedicated youths.

Juara for Prajnopaya

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Offer lasts until December 31, 2011.

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Gift to Prajnopaya

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