Activities - Awareness promotion about leprosy for early detection and treatment

3. Awareness promotion about leprosy for early detection and treatment,

Since awareness is crucial for the early detection and treatment of leprosy, Sewa Kendra has been engaged in three kinds of activities in three different settings for promoting it among the general public in, around and outside Kathmandu with its own limited resources and by mobilizing other sources of. Support.

• The Dolalghat field clinic

Sewa Kendra runs an outreach clinic once a week every Wednesday at Dolalghat, a small market town 82 kms. east of Kathmandu on the Nepal -Tibet (China) road. The clinic was initiated in 1996 as a monitoring station to get feel about the incidence of leprosy in a rural setting even as it also provides medical help to a region that, despite its accessibility, remains highly under-served, particularly when it comes to women's health. The clinic, with a catchment area of a 10 kms radius, remains highly popular among the local population, with many patients also coming from more distant places. The clinic, locally called “the Wednesday Clinic”, is run in a local school in cooperation with a local NGO, the Dolaleswor Club.The clinic normally receivessome 8000 patients in a year, more than two third of them being female. The extent of women's participation in the clinic underscores a major fault line in the country's health system; medical support is more difficult to come by for women than for men, and the "Wednesday clinic" brings quality medical care so much nearer for the local women.

Besides, due to continuing stigma against leprosy in the communities, suspected leprosy patients prefer to visit more distantly located facility like the Wednesday Clinic and to be treated away from the prying eyes of their neighbours and relatives. In  2009, 13 fresh leprosy cases with two of them already suffering from visible deformities (clawed hands) were identified and treated in Dolalghat even as 39 leprosy patients have been under its continuous treatment. When the patients attending the Wednesday Clinic need specialized treatment or hospital care, Sewa Kendra brings them to Kathmandu to treat them at its Gaushala facility or in other bigger hospitals where it obtains subsidized or free care for such referees. Dental, skin or family planning camps too are organised at regular intervals in the clinic by mobilising free services from relevant professional organisations.

• School Awareness Campaign through Girls and Boys Scout

Sewa Kendra has been running a school-based leprosy awareness campaign with the help of Girls and Boy Scouts. It has trained six scouts (3 girls and 3 boys) from its area on the basics of the leprosy disease, particularly, on its signs and symptoms, curability, and the imperative for early detection and treatment.. The scouts go from school to school sensitizing the children who are, in turn, encouraged to share their newly acquired knowledge about leprosy with their parents and relatives. Annually, the campaign reaches out to 52 schools in Kathmandu and the outskirts. While a number parents show up in Sewa Kendra for skin checkups after such sessions, in 2009 five of the children themselves, all of them under 14, too came to its Gaushala hospital for the treatment of what turned out to be leprosy cases after all.

• Skin camps

Skin camps are another method of spreading awareness about leprosy even as the participants also get relief from the various skin diseases they suffer from. Skin disease is after all one of the most common ailments among the people, mostly in the rural communities. Therefore, Sewa Kendra has been organizing daylong skin camps in different communities, mostly outside the urban perimeter of Kathamndu, at the initiative of the local NGOs and in partnership with specialized national professional organizations such as the Society of Dermatology, Venerology and Leprology of Nepal (SODVELON). While such camps are helpful for the people to treat their skin ailments, many of them being quite chronic, they are also useful occasionally to trap fresh or defaulter cases of leprosy.. Such skin camps generally engage three to six doctors, and are attended by a large number of patients, numbering some 300 to 500 in each. Since doctors' services and medications are free in such camps, they benefit the poor mostly. Annually, three skin camps are organized in little towns in the outskirts of Kathmandu, treating over 500 patients in each such camp. Two fresh cases and 16 defaulter cases of leprosy were found during the 2009 skin camp.