title: Introducing integrated health services in a traditional society: the Sudan community-based family health project.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Community Medicine, University of Khartoum.
authors.forename: A R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: El Tom
authors.forename: M H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Matthews
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wessley
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mubarak
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lauro