TRU's COVID response

Since the beginning of 2020 the world has witnessed an unprecedented pandemic of COVID – 19, a disease by a novel corona virus. To contain the spread of the virus within the country on the 25th of March the govt of India declared a 3-week nationwide lockdown and ordered the closure of non-essential businesses and services. Between the pandemic and the lockdown, numerous communities at margins of our society have faced significant hardship and deprivation. Over the course of the intervening month since the lockdown was declared we at TRU have refocused our community activities towards providing immediate relief to those affected by the pandemic and lockdown.
We have organized our relief efforts in to the following four main areas due to the tireless efforts of our brave health workers working at the grassroots.

Distribution of immediate relief

Daily wage workers and the rural poor communities are among the groups most affected by the national lockdown. With their source of already meager income drying up, these groups of people started running out of food rapidly. In consultation with our team members we identified 5 groups in need of immediate assistance:

Daily wage earners who had lost their wages because of the lockdown,
Families without agricultural land of their own,
Families who did not possess a ‘Ration card’ (for the Public Distribution System) or had no access to other grain supplies,
Families below the poverty line,
Families in which the earning members had emigrated to other parts of the state in search of employment in factories or farms.

Among these groups,TRU staff identified 400 of the most deprived families in 20 villages and delivered food kits to each of them. The food kit contains essential provisions including grains, pulses, oil, sugar, turmeric, chili powder, pauva, hand soaps, etc. We have already distributed more than 500 food kits. Given that the government recently extended the lockdown period by another three weeks until May 3rd, we anticipate that our efforts will need to be significantly scaled up to these vulnerable groups until they can begin earning again.

Delivering primary health care

TRU health associates, Aravindbhai and Keshavbhai preparing medicines for distribution to mental health patients during the lockdown.

Despite the pandemic and the lockdown, we could not ignore the continuing physical and mental health needs of hundreds of TRU patients spread across 368 villages and four blocks in the Panchmahals district and some outside the district also. These patients suffer from a variety of illnesses including hypertension, diabetes, chronic bronchitis, asthma, etc. There are hundreds of patients with epilepsy and long term mental health problems. With the help of TRU staff and link health workers we listed individual patients in each of the 368 villages in the district. We then inventoried our medicine stocks, filled over 600 individual prescriptions sufficient for a month’s supply of medicines and home-delivered these packets to each of our patients.

Due to the lockdown we have found it challenging to continue to operate all five of our mental health clinics in the Panchmahals. Fortunately, Dr Parth Soni one of our psychiatrists who lives near Shivrajpur, volunteered to operate two of our clinics in Ghoghamba and Shivrajpur villages; from the second week of April another psychiatrist also started providing essential mental health care in two other centers. These clinics have been serving a critical unmet need as evidenced by the fact that a large number of patients have been attending these clinics even travelling long distance from their villages.

Raising awareness about COVID-19

Amongst the rural and tribal communities in the Panchmahals, there is a significant amount of misinformation and panic regarding COVID 19 and the Corona virus. To counter this misinformation, we prepared an informational leaflet about COVID 19 in the local vernacular. Although we have been unable to print and distribute these leaflets due to the lockdown, we have distributed it widely through rural WhatsApp groups. We have also held training sessions for members of our staff over the phone. When our staff visit villages for distribution of food and medicine they also raise awareness about the virus and the disease among the village communities. With the encouragement of the Block Health Officer (BHO) of Halol we requested Dr Soni to conduct a special training program for our key staff in Shivrajpur regarding the virus and mechanisms to prevent its spread. He also taught the workers to run basic counseling sessions and clinics at our center. The BHO has since instructed all the government health cadres about these clinics and has encouraged them to refer patients to the counseling center at Shivrajpur.

Dr. Parth Soni training the key TRU rural staff on virus and mechanisms to prevent its spread

Preparation of masks

As part of our education initiatives TRU operates a residential hostel in Shivrajpur for girls who attend the local high school. The hostel provides the young girls a safe, secluded and stimulating environment to focus on their basic education and to learn essential life skills. Since the lockdown began, the girl students in the hostel have been sent back to their homes in their native villages. Motivated by the critical shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE)in the region the warden of the hostel in Shivrajpur decided to address this problem by volunteering to sew face-masks. In the last two weeks Geetaben has prepared over 200 face masks from readily available cotton cloth. We have since distributed these masks to TRU staff and to patients who attend our clinics.