Kush Jhunjhunwala, Ashish Satav and Sanjay Deshpande
University of Nagpur, India
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Ped Health Res
India’s healthcare sector provides a wide range of quality of care, from globally acclaimed hospitals in urban areas, to facilities that deliver care of unacceptably low quality, mainly in rural areas. Efforts to improve the quality of care are particularly challenged by the lack of skilled manpower, non-availability of medical instruments, good knowledge and quality trainers. An on-going effort aims to improve the quality of life and develop innovative solutions to long-standing challenges. In India, one in two children is malnourished in rural areas as compared to one in four in urban areas. In Melghat region which is infamous for the highest number of deaths due to malnutrition in India, we have been using the intervention model which uses ready-to-eat ‘therapeutic foods’ for severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and severe underweight (SUW) and that has yielded very good results, but in the long run cultivating the required food and consuming it is the only solution to malnutrition and thus the novel idea of ‘Kitchen garden’ was conceptualised. Due to this, the malnutrition rate in intervention villages has gone down by 50%. Kitchen garden in well to do educated families is a well-known concept, but to sell the same idea to uneducated tribal is totally different ball game. Similarly ARSH training program (Adolescent Reproductive Sexual Health) training camps for adolescent children were undertaken on large scale to impart knowledge as well as to improve the quality of life of adolescents, thus decreasing the incidence of AIDS and STDs by more than 60% in the interventional area. Another program that is ‘Home based child care program’ is to reduce the rate of child death and malnutrition. We attempt to save lives every day and strive to create a positive impact on more than 5 lakhs tribal people, in the Melghat area of Maharashtra state in India.
Kush Jhunjhunwala completed Medicine at NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences and did his Doctor of Medicine (MD) in Paediatrics Government Medical College, Nagpur University. He was a Senior Resident in Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospital (KSCH), New Delhi. He worked as an Assistant professor in Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, J.N.M.C. Sawangi (Meghe) Wardha and Government Medical College, Nagpur. He has been a registered as a doctor with the Maharashtra Medical Council. Presently he is working as Paediatric Consultant in his own hospital Jhunjhunwala Hospital in Nagpur.
E-mail: kush_73@yahoo.co.in
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