Bringing Hope through ASHAs

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ASHA (or Accredited Social Health Worker) is our hope to reduce the high neonatal and maternal mortality rate amongst the poor population. 


Every day, each ASHA educates nearly 50 women about basic healthcare and ensures better healthcare facilities to mothers and their children. These community health workers are our first point of contact for promoting health awareness and counseling.


But since most of these health workers tend to have little training and often operate independently, community health programs become less effective and difficult to run. 


Save the Children, with support of Hewlett Packard, is working to improve the quality of community health programs in Kishangarh Block of Ajmer, Rajasthan by training and equipping ASHAs with mobile phones running specialized software. 


These mobile phones have software that contains registration forms, checklists, danger sign monitoring and educational prompts. 


This software (called CommCare) keeps a simple history for each patient and data from every visit will be transferred to a centralized location when the ASHA enters network coverage area.  




Programme Objectives: 


  • To train ASHAs to use mobile phone as an aid for imparting health related information, advice and record keeping of their patients. 


  • To develop and test modules for enrollment of pregnant women and newborns. 


  • To increase the number of pregnant women enrolled by ASHAs.


  • To improve care delivered by ASHAs to newborns after birth.


Achievements: 


  • 70 ASHAs have been trained on pregnancy and newborn care module.


  • Till date 95 % of the ASHAs are active and they have submitted 5,713 forms on the CommCare application. Currently, we are reaching out to 938 mothers and 960 children.


  • Behavior change of the community has become much easier and faster as villagers see the mobile phones as a trusted source of information and this can be seen in increase in vaccination and institutional delivery.


  • The Public Health Care in-charges and the Lady Health Supervisors (LHVs) are also finding the project useful as the ASHAs are actively participating in the counselling of beneficiaries and facilitating healthy behaviour in the communities.
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