Community Health care, Sanitation and Hygiene

REACH, "Reach Each CHild" - A Child Healthcare Centric Initiative,

In February 2014, a Committee was formed, which decided that the Social initiatives of the group will focus on ‘Child Healthcare’. Twenty leading pediatricians across India were invited for the meeting at Ahmedabad to have understanding of the issues pertaining to the health of children. The meeting was followed by visits by the committee members to some of the leading child care facilities in India and also visited several leading pediatric hospitals in UK, USA and Canada to get a first-hand understanding of the healthcare facilities being provided to the children.

Initiated in 2016, REACH is a Child Healthcare centric initiative and the flagship program of UNM Foundation. The involvement of the employees of Torrent Group as volunteers under the program has been a key pillar of the program.

• Activities under REACH are divided into two major parts
   
• Grassroot interventions:Spreading child healthcare awareness and providing support in addressing malnutrition and anemia.
• Clinical interventions:Establishing pediatric healthcare centers and state-of-the-art hospitals to treat underprivileged children.
           

1.	Grass Root Interventions
2.	Clinical Facilities

• Grass Root Interventions
• Clinical Facilities
       
Grass Root Interventions:
The main activities (at no cost to the beneficiaries) are:
   
   
• Conducting focused camps and spreading awareness about Child healthcare
   
• During outreach activities, children needing clinical interventions are referred to our nearest Pediatric Primary Healthcare Centers (PPHCs) and subsequently, if required, they are then taken to the UNM Children Hospital for secondary and tertiary treatment
   
• Identifying cases of malnutrition & anemia and distributing nutritional supplements and iron supplements
   
• One of the problems that came up during the program to treat malnutrition and anemia within children was that children would often stop taking the supplements due to monotony of taste of such supplements. To address this problem, UNM Foundation has developed Nutri dense cookies (named “Mauji”), which have a good taste and provide necessary nutrition to malnourished children.
   
• Spreading health and hygiene awareness amongst adolescent girls and providing them environmentally friendly sanitary napkins.
   
• Progress so far:
         
  • More than 1,600 villages have been covered
         
  • 1.5 lakh children screened and more than 70,000 children have been successfully brought out of malnutrition and anemia with focused efforts and rigorous monitoring.
         
  • More than 72000 girls (unique beneficiaries) in 1200+ villages are benefitted through the initiative.
     
   
   
       
Clinical Facilities
PPHC    
• 10 Pediatric Primary Healthcare Centers (UNM Children PHC) have been established in Gujarat in different locations. The locations have been chosen with an intent to maximize the outreach to underprivileged
   
• Apart from providing free of cost treatment to children for various ailments, these PHCs also work as Spoke-centers for HUB at UNM Children Hospital near Sugen.


• Two more PHCs in Gujarat and One in Agra are recently started
   
•    More than 6.2 lakh OPD have been carried out so far through from these centers / hospitals.