Our Vision and Mission
TRU has worked for over 25 years in rural community health care
Improving women's health is key to improving overall health of the community
TRU runs subsidized diagnostic centre for laboratory services in Vadodara
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The Trust for Reaching the Unreached (TRU) has strived at instituting simple medical/health measures by demystification of technology and by consistent health education in the communities where we have worked. Changing health habits and affecting correct morbidity behaviour in a community have been the common thread of all our interventions. So, process indicators such as ability of a community to make use of vaccination program, use of ORS for prevention of dehydration, aseptic deliveries, care of newborn, utilisation of facilities such as PHC, CHC, welfare schemes, etc are important for us to achieve.
Having said this we advocate that prevention of communicable diseases through education and providing rational, regular support to cure these diseases is a way to improve life of people. Hence health education and curative medical treatment through outpatient primary care clinics which direct the patients correctly for secondary and tertiary care as and when required are two focal points of TRU's intervention. Chronic illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, mental illnesses, aches and pains also receive good attention in our programmes. Even for chronic illnesses, we need to provide consistent health education aiming at better lifestyle and work conditions in addition to regular, rational and affordable medical treatment. Social interventions aiming at improving women's social status have an important statute among several interventions. TRU worked for initiating self-help groups, enabling saving and credit schemes for women, vocational training for women, etc in the past. Secondly, education, especially formal education has an enabling role towards better life conditions and therefore TRU has worked for preparing the community to avail of school, high-school and higher education opportunities for their children. Beginning with working for strengthening of primary education through a Week-End School initiative, TRU also advocated and worked for Alternative School Education classes for those out of school children. We worked for better education opportunities for girl child through informal educationcampaigns and through self-help groups. Our Girls' Education Project is a culmination of our efforts in bringing up the education standards of the communities. This project will not only help the girls but shall have an effect on their families to come.
We started some programmes for improving urban poor women's health status through self-help groups and savings-credit programmes in addition to health activities. Other interventions of importance were through supplementary education for school, creative activity centres, advocating science education, and gender programmes. These were part of our efforts to improve better health status of urban poor in several slums of Vadodara city. As offshoots of this 9 year long intervention, TRU currently works for provision of diagnostic services at highly subsidised rates. We also have a vocational training program for women and a play-centre for young children living in slums. Though the latter two are very small interventions, we continue them because they do bring difference to the lives of those who are part of the program, if not for the whole of the communities.
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