Introducing integrated health services in a traditional society: the Sudan community-based family health project.
The Sudan Community Based Family Health Project, begun in 1980, has sought to demonstrate that the existing cadre of practicing government-trained village midwives in the Sudan can be utilized to extend maternal and child health services to rural areas. A majority of these midwives are nonliterate, and attention was placed on effectively implementing a limited set of services, namely, oral rehydration, birth-spacing, nutrition education, and immunization. Carefully planned inservice training programs for midwives and local health workers and an intensive service introduction campaign implemented in phases resulted in mixed success over a relatively short period of observation. Perhaps the most important lessons that have emerged from the program have been about how to design and implement a rural MCH program building on local resources. The experience has since lead project staff to undertake, in a new area, a follow-up program designed to be a more cost-effective and replicable version of the original one.
El Tom
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Department of Community Medicine, University of Khartoum.
Matthews
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MH
Wessley
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S
Mubarak
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Lauro
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D