After three packed days of interviewing and interacting with the community, I was honestly a little relieved that on day four we were given some time to relax before we had to tend to business. We learned so much and experienced a significant amount of change, from conversing with adolescent girls in the community to figuring out how to hand wash and dry our clothes, in such a short period of time. I used this time to recollect my thoughts to make sense of what I was feeling before because in the moment all I could think was “wow”. A couple of hours later, we got a knock on our door from Prasanta who informed us that we had a visitor here to interview but I didn’t catch the name. We made our way down to the main meeting area to find a table full of well-dressed men. When we sat down, Mr. Mishra introduced our guest at the head of the table, Dr. Bhihera. And by the way, he isn’t just a doctor…he’s the chief of the district health office. He explained to us the general health structure of the health system involving community health centers, private health centers, and smaller subsectors (like Srimula primary health center) and answered all the questions we could think of in the moment. His answers included a lot of information that we learned at Srimula, however, he spoke about something that was surprisingly not mentioned once yesterday: incentivizing patients. To incentivize women to give birth in hospitals, due to safety and sanitary reasons, the government pays for the transportation to the hospital, maternity leave (500 rupees per month for six months), and even just giving birth in the hospital (1400 rupees). There is also an incentive for regular patients to travel to the hospital (500 rupees) when in need of care. I was floored because the government provides all these benefits on top of universal health care. In addition to these incentives, the government also pays each village 10,000 rupees a month to use for whatever they decided was necessary for the health of the community. I expected India to be a conservative society due to culture and traditions, but these incentives are extremely progressive and socialistic. He soon had to go to another meeting, but assured us that he will schedule to meet again before we leave. And of course, I was back at square one attempting making sense of the “wow” I was experiencing.
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authorsAntoinette Nguyen |