Methodology
To empower rural communities to prevent common illnesses through in-home infrastructure development, community leader training, and health education.
PLANNING
In rural Ghanaian, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Panamanian communities where Public Health Brigades currently operates, there exist common diseases greatly affecting the health of community members which can be alleviated by simply improving home infrastructure and personal hygiene education. Public Health Brigades strives to combat these easily preventable diseases through low cost sustainable infrastructure projects utilizing materials that can be sourced locally and designs that can be taught to empowered local community experts.
RESULTS
The Public Health program in Ghana, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama each implement a combination of the following projects: clean-burning stoves, cement floors, showers, water storage, and latrines. Public Health team members work with community leaders to prepare communities for projects, inventory materials, and hire local experts. Once the community has been prepared, foreign student volunteers and professionals work alongside community members to construct each public health project during Public Health Brigades.
In addition to the infrastructure projects, Public Health Brigades also works with communities to provide health education to school-age children and adults in the community. The Public Health team collaborates with school teachers and other key community members to develop a curriculum that will directly address the communities’ needs, while volunteers prepare lessons for the children during each brigade.
Years of Medical Brigade patient records, illustrated the most common diseases on a community level to be high levels of chronic respiratory disease, skin fungal infections, parasites and diarrhea tracked back to a poor in-home infrastructure. The Public Health projects in each country represent the best solutions to these challenging conditions in the home. Along with poor conditions in the home, there also exists an underdeveloped concept of preventative health on a community-wide scale. These observations inspired the creation of the Public Health program, as many of these medical problems could be diminished or prevented through a combination of education within the community and infrastructure improvements within each home.
STRATEGY
