Mother & Child-Prevention of Disability

In our last report, we shared the strategy we used for identifying women who could benefit from our project on mother and child .We already do surveys for disability identification and since our survey workers were well-known in the field, they could go on to shift the focus from the child to the mother easily. Three months is too short a period for major chaages to happen, particularly when it is disability related.

Howver,we found that many women   are unaware that healthy pregnancies begin before conception. They are also not sufficiently informed about the importance of early pregnancy diagnosis and early prenatal care and the benefits of continued care throughout the pregnancy, particularly if there is a history of disability in the family. Numerous opportunities exist before pregnancy to decrease the risk of poor pregnancy outcomes as well as address avoidable disability.Through our surveys we were able to identify mothers “at risk” for having a child with some disability and provided relevant prenatal services, counseling, awareness, information and support. We were also able to detect children in the 0 –3 age group with symptoms of disability and therefore at “risk” for developmental delay. But the mothers had taken no precaution or preventive measures.

We have done massive promotions through our puppet shows and the house to house of our survey workers.We also found that there are "social service "units of hospitals who do offer relevant prenatal counselling and medication once a week when they visit the area. But as our survey worker Sarojini  assured us, the fact that we provide not only what is available through hospital outreach programmes but offer it in the community within commuting distance plus offer services to the chidren as well is our USP. 

Therefore our next step will be to offer an afternoon session for mothers we identified during our surveys and also reach out to women in general with focus on young girls about to be married or newly married. For this purpose we have identified a Gynecologist who will be able to counsel and guide women through their pregnancies as well as educate all women in general on disability issues as needed.. For those children  who also need support we offer  our educational and Rehabilitation services.

Our next strategy is to offer periodic workshops on the subject of prevention of disability for all women in the  community. Our pre-pregnancy awareness program will include information about poor pregnancy outcomes, awareness, knowledge and education about the prevention and treatment of genetic conditions resulting in children being born with avoidable disability. Although it is easy to go off on a tangent and focus solely on women ‘s issues we are basically an NGO set up for children with intellectual disability and so we will retain this focus.