[procaare] Re: Gaborone CHBC 2001 - ProCAARE Member Impressions (2)

[Jean Sack <jsack@citechco.net>]

Materials in share in CHBC training?
- Jean Sack, Bangladesh
******************************

I've been reading the summaries of the Botswana conference with high interest
here in Bangladesh. A small university has asked me to participate in the
planning of a short course for Bengali housewives who have chronically ill
(heart, stroke, diabetes, TB, etc) or disabled family members in their homes.
There is no home nursing liaisons with hospitals discharging patients. There are
no hospice caregiving agencies in Dhaka. There are scarcely enough trained
nurses in clinics or hospitals...

Although your conference was largely geared towards AIDS care and support for
those impacted family members (and I know some of the extremity of our African
caregivers after my daughter worked in Botswana for three years), I see a
valuable South-South exchange possibility. While back in the USA (I was a public
health librarian at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), I tried to gather
appropriate curriculum for conducting a short course for family on caring for
their ill loved ones. I'm afraid we are spoiled.

Even the American Association of Occupational Therapists library/resource centre
came up short in layman's level curriculum guides or teaching videos. The
Baltimore area hospices could not produce (in a short time) a check list of
skills they expected their home visitors to have (surely they had training in a
consistent way?). Johns Hopkins CCP showed me a WHO manual for AIDS care which
had good illustrations for moving patients, charting medicines, bedbaths, etc.
NLM has good layman information on the
web, in English, about various maladies which could be utilized and perhaps
later translated for non-English speaking Bengalis...

Obviously we in Bangladesh will need to develop a culturally sensitive
curriculum with observable outcomes from "hands on" sessions but I hate to see
this germinal idea die because of intensive efforts to "reinvent the wheel." Do
you have materials which you could share for imitation? Are there organizations
such as yours which mount manuals and illustrations on the web for instruction
on home health care?

I think that Bangladesh needs to develop medical personnel who do home health
care assessments and training of housewives. This could be a new career field
for young Muslim women who would never enter a hospital but who might be willing
to work at a household level.

Many resources are here in this country: a fine OT/PT training program at the
Centre for Rehabilitation of the Paralyzed; the capacity to copy almost any
assistive device in local workshops including walking bars, wheelchairs,
walkers, lifts; the extra housestaff available to help with bathing, lifting,
feeding; the increased awareness of longevity producing handicaps in elderly.
It would be very good to develop a program and career path before AIDS hits this
nation (although our Centre would like to participate in BCC and medical
interventions to prevent HIV spread).

Thank you for assisting us in the search for simple and effective training tools
for home-based health care.

Jean C. Sack
ICDDR,B: Centre for Health and Population Research
Dhaka, Bangladesh
E-mail: jsack@citechco.net


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