Improved Care and Protection of Girl Children

Introduction

Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT) has been striving to provide comprehensive care and protection services to street and working children. This package of services includes residential facilities, health and nutrition, education, vocational training and rehabilitation services. A critical component of this package is medical and health facilities. SBT strongly believes that health and nutrition lay a strong foundation of children’s holistic development. This becomes particularly significant in the case of children living on the streets who survive in deprived and hostile conditions. Evidence shows that children on streets live in insanitary conditions and are prone to various infections and diseases. Most of these children have low or no access to nutritious food. Many of them consume foods devoid of essential macro and micro nutrients and become susceptible to undernutrition or malnutrition.

Living on streets children face violence and abuse. Many of them are beaten by adults or elder children on streets. As a result they become vulnerable to physical injuries and road traffic incidents. Given these multiple reasons, providing children adequate medical facilities is often the first priority for SBT team. In an endeavour to ensure effective delivery of medical services, SBT has envisioned a multifaceted medical programme comprising medical check-ups, vaccination services, first-aid, hospital care and provision of medicines and other consumables

Goal and Objectives

The overarching goal of the medical programme is to improve health and nutritional status of children rescued from the streets. In tandem with this broad goal the programme endeavours to achieve following three pronged objectives:

• To improve access of children living on streets to adequate and timely medical services through contact points
• To improve access to adequate and timely medical services of children rescued and/or motivated to residential centres
• To strengthen medical and health programme to ensure maximum quality health care

The details of the program are mentioned in the attached report.

• SBTMedicalProgrammeNote07022019.docx (DOCX)