You are about to visit a Philips global content page
You are about to visit the Philips USA website.
The 2-year project VISHWAAS is a collaboration between Philips Foundation, Save the Children India, the social enterprise ZMQ Development and Philips India CSR to develop and prove low-cost innovative approaches for prevention, diagnosis and management of Childhood Pneumonia. The project is built around digital mHealth applications, targeting 4 audiences: community members, frontline health workers (ASHAs, ANMs), and medical officers/staff nurses. The intervention also uses the ChARM device to aid pneumonia identification through automated respiratory rate measurement.
The VISHWAAS project took an integrated approach to innovate the management of childhood pneumonia. It used a systemic change model that addresses prevention, protection, diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia. The key interventions focused on social behaviour change communication (SBCC) and case management. These were supported with technology interventions as well as strengthened capacity building, immunization and medication.
Key interventions included:
A solid monitoring and evaluation framework was pursued to measure the outcomes of increased community awareness and care seeking behavior, as well as improved case detection and management. In addition, data and information systems were strengthened to allow systematic tracking of pneumonia care outcomes.
The project was implemented across 45 urban wards in Rajasthan, and two rural blocks in Uttar Pradesh and brought high-quality pneumonia care to approximately 110,000 under-five children.
After almost two years of project implementation, strong improvement is observed across the board of outcome indicators, both for community awareness and care seeking as well as for improved case management. Key achievements include:
The Android-based mHealth Pneumonia Tools designed to drive behavior change and support frontline health workers with standard protocols to identify, classify, manage, refer and treat childhood pneumonia – developed by ZMQ – were successfully used by 144 ASHAs and 26 ANMs.
Some observations about the use of the tools made by Dr. Op Singh, Head Program Implementation Health & Nutrition at Save the Children India, during a webinar organized by Philips Foundation:
Observations related to digital tool design (from Ayushi Singh, program manager ZMQ, shared during the same webcast):
The open-source tools are available free of charge from Google Play Store.
The ChARM point of care device for respiratory rate measurement received good acceptance among health workers. Most of them found the device useful for their work. They indicated the assessment with ChaRM is less time-consuming and the red light to display increased breathing made classification easier and helpful in convincing parents to take the child to a health facility for follow up assessment.
Save the Children India has formulated a comprehensive set of recommendations to convert the learnings from the VISHWAAS project to sustained and scalable impact.
Status
Concluded
When
2019 - 2022
[1] Key interventions in more detail
[2] Recording and presentations from dissemination webinar
February 14, 2022
February 04, 2022
December 12, 2021
November 29, 2021
You are about to visit a Philips global content page
You are about to visit the Philips USA website.