I am this week concluding a one month's visit to Jan Swasthya Sahyog / JSS (The People's Health Support Group) in Chhattisgarh, a state in Central India.  I write to you now because JSS, which serves the most destitute of India, is critically short-staffed and volunteer opportunities abound. (I personally will return in July 2010 to assist with a documentation project, based on personal histories, on how poverty and ill-health interact, each re-enforcing the other.) -- Dr Jonathan E. Fine, M.D., M.P.H., Boston. 
Read Dr Fine's full note and interview of JSS's Dr Yogesh

Dear Friends,

I am this week concluding a one month's visit to Jan Swasthya Sahyog / JSS (The People's Health Support Group) in Chhattisgarh, a state in Central India.

I write to you now because JSS, which serves the most destitute of India, is critically short-staffed and volunteer opportunities abound. (I personally will return in July 2010 to assist with a documentation project, based on personal histories, on how poverty and ill-health interact, each re-enforcing the other.)

Founded ten years ago, Jan Swasthya Sahyog/JSS (People’s Health Support Group) is one of India’s and the world’s most spectacularly successful experiments in the delivery of health care to impoverished rural communities. JSS provides comprehensive primary care services to 53 remote, extremely deprived, forest communities but also receives poor patients from a total of 1,500 villages in central Chhattisgarh at its hospital and outpatient facilities in the village of Ganiyari, Bilaspur District.

JSS is a leader in low-cost technologies it has designed for rural diagnostic, preventive and curative health services. The group is equally renowned for its publications and advocacy for fundamental reforms needed to bring access and equity in health care to all of rural India. Many of the founder members were trained at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi or at the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

With an ever-increasing patient load, and the provision of all levels of clinical services, public health, and even sponsorship of agricultural development, its medical staff is severely overtaxed and short-staffed in clinical, research, public health initiatives and supporting specialty roles.

The hope is that volunteers may be found to come to Ganiyari for periods ranging from three months to two years. Each will make an enormous difference in the lives of severely impoverished villagers and have the experience of a lifetime working with world-class physician and non-physician professionals and allied staff.

Recently, I interviewed Yogesh Jain, one of the founding physicians of JSS, on the volunteer professional staff that SS urgently needs to recruit. That interview is immediately below.

If you or any friends may be interested, you may write to me personally if you wish or to Dr. Jain and his colleagues at JSS directly at the e-mail address that follows.


- Jonathan E. Fine, M.D., M.P.H.

***************************************************

Dr Fine Interviews Dr Jain

Dr Yogesh Jain on The Need for Volunteers at Jan Swasthya Sahyog


We need physicians with a sensitivity to injustice and inequality, but technically trained and not prisoners of their own specialization, to work here with flexibility for periods that range from 3 months to 2 years, preferably coming from more general specialties like medicine, pediatrics, surgery or obstetrics, but also orthopedics, eye. Other specialists who are open to see problems that don’t belong to their own specialization are also welcome.

Besides this, the people we require are those keen on working in the community, trying to support programs that are already running, like in nutrition or women’s health, or in trying to understand the reasons for poor access and poor quality in health care or interested in training, primary health care workers in the community. These people should know at least one Indian language.

People who have skills in making films or in documentation would also be useful but that would require advanced planning as to what they would do, i.e. reconnaissance. I am sure that people who are keen on working with children would be very welcome, again if they speak an Indian language.

You haven’t mentioned pharmacy, and lab.

Other clinical skills would also be of use. Nurses who are trainers, laboratory technicians who like working in peripheral laboratories (e.g. the lab here at JSS in Ganiyari) and people who would like to learn and teach in other paramedical fields, either to support and train technicians who are here or to train technicians elsewhere. We need an army of trainers. There is a huge unmet need for training groups who work with the disadvantaged and don’t have anybody to support them.

What about administrators?

I am not terribly clear how administrators who come for a short duration will help but setting up systems by implementing them, and by being part of one, might leave lasting changes in how our operations are run. But this will have to be fleshed out.

What would the minimum period be for such volunteer service?

A minimum of six months or maybe even one year.

What about mental health professionals?

Some one would have to be here for two years at least and must know Hindi…an Indian-American. One year also is fine. That could result in a lasting change here. Someone could come and set it up. People who are starting new things, at least for one year.

If you, or any colleague, might be interested in volunteering, please write to us at JSSVolunteerSupport@gmail.com. Also, we will appreciate your forwarding this message to others. Lack of knowledge of an Indian language should not discourage applicants. Individual assessments will be made of how best to utilize each person’s skills.