Los Filiu
After a couple of very productive days in Consuelo, I took my first trip into the barrios, or neighborhoods, where the Niños Primeros en Salud (NPS) program has been working since 2009. Ramona, our NPS nurse, walks through these barrios every day and into the evening after her work at the clinic ends. She tirelessly reminds mothers to take their children to the clinic for their shots, talks about the benefits of breastfeeding and dispenses words of advice whenever she needs to. She knows the names and homes and stories of every single patient enrolled in the program, a truly amazing feat.
During our walk through Barrio Filliu, the largest of the four target barrios, Ramona told me about the changes she has seen since she started doing community outreach for the program almost two years ago. Nearly 100% of the children in the barrios are immunized, all of the children take their de-parasite medicine every 6 months, and many of the come on a regular basis to the clinic to be seen by our pediatricians. The number of children in our nutrition program because of malnourishment has decreased dramatically, and those that haven’t graduated from the program are followed closely by our medical team. The women I spoke to in the barrios echoed what I heard from Ramona…that little by little the children in the community are getting healthier.
Although we have a long way to go, we are well on our way to getting there.
Posted at 08:19PM Feb 22, 2011 by Maura Murphy in Health | Comments[0]