Competing against malnutrition
Friday, 27 October 2006
Malnutrition is one of the common health problems in many countries, mainly those that experience food shortages year in year out, Malawi included.
This article appeared on Malawi Nation Online
written by by Felix Malamula
The chronic food scarcity in Malawi does not spare any age group. But as expected, children are the most hit. There are factors that account for this sad state of affairs.
Children wait to be fed by grown ups. Children cannot fend for themselves. And when fangs of hunger bite harder, the grown ups end up taking care of themselves first before thinking of the children.
Realising this, government and non-governmental organisations have been coming up with a number of interventions to save vulnerable children. One such organisation is Concern Worldwide (CWW).
The organisation is working towards fighting malnutrition among children in Nkhotakota, one of the districts where the problem is said to be rampant.
"We came in in 2002 to help empower hospitals within the district to fight malnutrition. But for that to be achieved, we came up with this competition for health centres," said Glyciahnie Mapulanga, CWW programme advisor.
He was referring to a competition his organisation was running in the past four years in which health centres in the district fight for a trophy and other material and cash prizes.
The organisers of the competition look at how malnourished children are received at a health centre and how community therapeutic care (CTC) is carried out, among others. The centre that carries out these activities the best in a quarter of a year gets the trophy.
CWW divided the competition into two - the Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit (NRU) - where the focus is on quality of services offered at the NRU of every health centre to malnourished children and the Outpatient Therapeutic Programme (OTP).
Apart from the competition, CWW has engaged the services of community volunteers who go into all the villages and provide health education to the villagers for prevention of malnutrition.
"But added to that the community volunteers help detect potential cases of malnutrition and bring them to the nearest health centre for treatment," says Sister Stephanie Phiri, matron at Alinafe Community Hospital which grabbed the trophy for the last quarter.
As Phiri explains, when such cases are referred to a health centre, they are screened to determine if they are moderate or severe malnutrition. They are therefore treated according to the degree of malnutrition.
"If we discover its severe malnutrition we admit the child and if it is moderate, we just give the right foods to the mother to feed the child at home," says Phiri.
Traditional Authority Mwadzama of the district was part of the group that sang praises to the fight against malnutrition being spearheaded by CWW.
The traditional leader notes that before the programme women with malnourished children were staying long in hospitals unlike today when the worst cases stay in hospital for a week or two.
"Cases are spotted in time before they get worse as a result most of them are not serious and most women are staying for a few days in malnutrition centres unlike in the past," says Chief Mwadzama.
The fight against malnutrition in the district is left in the hands of the people themselves led by the district health office. Concern Worldwide comes in with technical assistance.
Mapulanga, however, says CWW will eventually leave the programme in the hands of the communities. To that effect, CWW is making sure communities are taking a leading role as Nkhotakota Assistant District Health Officer, Dryton Makanjira says.
"We are fully aware that time will come when the programme will be left in our hands. We will not abandon it but continue because Nkhotakota is one of the districts highly affected by the problem of malnutrition," says Makanjira.
