Field Placement: Emmanuel Hospital Association; Herbertpur Christian Hospital
Location: North India
Preceptor: Dr. Rebecca Madden, OD MPH
Student Name: Christina Ha
Year: 2004

CHASINI Evaluation

From June-August 2004, I was given the opportunity to work with the Emmanuel Hospital Association (EHA) at their second largest hospital, Herbertpur Christian Hospital in the Community Health Division. Emmanuel Hospital Association was founded in 1970 as an indigenous Christian health and development agency serving the people of North India in primarily focused on the poor living in rural areas. With a catchment population of nearly seven million, EHA treats more than 500,000 patients each year in some of India's most needy areas.

Herbertpur is located in a mainly agricultural part of North India, an hour’s drive away from the state capital, Dehradun. The project at Herbertpur started in the 1980’s as a response to the prevalence of tuberculosis in one of the villages in the Vikas Nagar block. It has slowly expanded its activities from being solely focused on health to include several development activities. Herbertpur’s community health division covers 74,000 people in 47 of the surrounding villages. Some of the main projects are conducting self-help groups, literacy programs, adolescent sexual awareness groups, weekly medical and mobile clinics, and capacity building among government health workers and local medical practitioners.

My time at Herbertpur can be divided into two phases. During the first phase, I was able to become acquainted with the different projects by visiting several village self-help groups, assisting in the mobile clinics, and helping with various training programs. I was given the opportunity to attend a variety of development-related workshops, providing me with insight on proper management of an NGO and how to navigate within a specific country’s policy. This period also provided me with time to become exposed to the language and become sensitive to cultural norms.

During the second phase of my internship, I worked on the evaluation of one of the main community health projects, entitled “CHASINI,” an adolescent health-awareness program conducted by local peer educators. CHASINI is a project that was first piloted at Herbertpur and is currently being conducted at 7 EHA Community Health Units across Northern India. It originally started in April 2001 and is still continuing today. Several years ago, the EHA health team created a pre and post-test to be used to monitor the effectiveness of the program. Unfortunately, no evaluation of the method or data collected had been done since the start of the program. Therefore, my contribution was to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate these previously collected data from pre and post tests. Using my findings, I was able to assess the efficacy of the program and provide several suggestions for improvement. The evaluation will be used to refine the health education program, creating a more sustainable and meaningful project.

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