Dear all:

I just received this from my other listserve.  I actually looked up this couple thinking their names sounded familiar and indeed, they did their MPH at the same time I was working on my MHS at Hopkins and we took some classes together.  The details are not as important as the over all approach of "listening to their patients".  I've also seen this work for Ministers of Health, heads of NGOs and District Level Health Officers when trying to figure out how to motivate health care workers at the community level.  When they "listen to their workers" progress is made.  I am curious about what they did with the infant sleeping bags.  So while this is not directly related to breastfeeding, the overall approach is.

Best Susan Burger

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Inspiration, Integration, and Impact.
 
September 14 & 15, 2010
 
Recipient of the 2010 Dory Storms Award, Dr. Abhay Bang, will be our keynote speaker. Dr. Bang is one of the public health heroes of India who has been working seamlessly to promote public health support and awareness in Gadchiroli, one of the most challenging districts of Maharashtra bordering Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. He and his wife, Dr. Rani Bang, earned world recognition for their work across hundreds of villages in Gadchiroli spanning nearly twenty-five years. Both originally graduates in public health from the Johns Hopkins University, they returned to India and concentrated their energies on solving problems related to infant mortality, malnutrition and women’s health.
 
"We decided to listen to our patients," says Abhay.
 
Trained respectively as a physician and a gynecologist, their dream was to develop an institution of community health that provided health care to the local population, and generated knowledge for the global community by way of research. They founded a trust they called the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH). The mission of SEARCH is to work with marginalized communities to identify their health needs, develop community empowering models of health care to meet these health needs, to test these models by way of research studies, and then to make this knowledge available to others by way of training and publications.
 
They decided to tackle the stubbornly high child-mortality rate in the villages they worked in and identified 18 causes of newborn death, from the obvious, like malnutrition, to the surprising, like the habit of expectant Gond mothers starving themselves and their unborn child for an easier birth. The Bangs found no problems that couldn't be treated by a health worker with rudimentary skills, some infant sleeping bags, and an abacus on which to record every 10 heartbeats. So they drew up a health training program that they taught to a newly assembled corps of village health workers. In 1999, the Bangs published the results of their efforts, again in the Lancet. They had cut child mortality in half--a figure that would fall to a quarter by 2003--for a cost of $2.64 for each child saved. The program is being adopted across India, where more than a quarter of the 4 million annual newborn deaths occur, and in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and parts of Africa.
 
In 2006, they started an the NIRMAN initiative---for identifying and nurturing social change-makers in Maharashtra.  They continue to live and work in Gadchiroli, India where they provide medical care and conduct research in 100 villages. Inspirational teachers, the Bangs have mentored several generations of community health practitioners. 

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