Under this project, a person is selected from the village to look after his/her own village health care needs. The criteria for Sevak is that they must live in the village and should have minimum 12th grade education. They will be given training in health care, sanitation, water purification, prevention of diarrhoeal diseases, infectious diseases, chronic medical conditions and lifestyle modification. They will also be trained to do BP and blood sugar measurement. Sevaks then go house to house to do health screening and those with pre-hypertension, hypertension, pre-diabetes or diabetes are provided lifestyle modification education and if BP or FBS is high, are referred to doctors.
The Sevaks also check BP and fasting blood sugar (FBS) of those who have established diabetes or hypertension and provide them lifestyle modification education. All Sevaks have been provided with binders for reference. Gujarat has been divided into four zones - north, south, central and west. Each zone has a coordinator and the coordinators job is to visit the village in his zone once a month and provide any logistics support such as survey forms, stylets, strips, repair needs and collect the survey forms to input into an XL file and send it to Thakor G Patel, MD, MACP.
To date, data has been collected in about 35,000 people that shows the prevalence of diabetes to be 5.8 % - 3.4% did not know they had diabetes, 9.6% had pre-diabetes, 10% with hypertension and 15.9% had pre-hypertension. Sevak Project has data on source of drinking water, energy source for cooking, education level and toilets. Since the beginning of the project the number of toilets have doubled in every village and the awareness for diabetes, hypertension has increased.
A Sevak training and seminar was held from 26-28 December 2014. First day and a half was spent to train the Sevaks on Saving Children's Lives. This training was conducted by the American Heart Association (AHA). It is the first project by AHA in India, we are hoping the trained Sevaks will save children's lives below the age of 5. In India, there is a high mortality in this age group for multiple reasons. We are hoping for this program to succeed. Now, the IIT alumni have formed an NGO called WHEELS and Habitat for Humanity India and involved with RO water and toilet project. We just inaugurated an RO plant and toilets in Agiya village, Sabarkantha district, Gujarat.
Thakor G Patel, MD, MACP
CAPT MC USN (Ret)
