Introduction Para:

Mother and Child nutrition remains a major challenge. Training and counseling mothers and other family members for nutrition and hygiene is a very important task. The role of Field Health Workers is critical in this. Blending online and face-to-face training allows for rapid expansion of training to unreached areas.

Shrimati Malati Dahanukar Trust (SMDT) successfully developed a Comprehensive Trainings on “First 1000 days – Maternal, Infant and Young Child Nutrition” for Health Workers over 3 days covering technical and counseling skills, to prevent malnutrition in mothers and children thereby preventing underweight, stunting & wasting. Extensive learning material, printed as well as videos, in local languages, help learners to understand faster and also use same material to train and counsel the mothers in the communities. The videos, developed under the Spoken Tutorial Project at IIT Bombay, include 50+ videos on mother and child nutrition, developed in multiple local languages, with very simple explanation suitable even for novice learners.

To tackle the covid situation and to scale up, the SMDT has converted this program to a blended online / face-to-face model. This opens up opportunity to expand the training to many more field health workers in shorter time, and also better follow up with Health workers and their continuous learning.

The program has reached to thousands of Field Health Workers. The program also includes provision to track impact of counseling on the health of infants.

The programme covers the following objectives:

• To empower Filed Health Workers as master trainers with the technical knowledge of Infant & Young Child Nutrition & counselling techniques, including mother’s feeding and subsequent food.
• To make them confident to impart the same training to their colleagues and to mothers and other caregivers of young infant and children, with help of printed and electronic materials.
• To help caregivers to help their children to survive and thrive, so that they reach their physical and intellectual potential, by improving their knowledge of health, hygiene and nutrition and child development.
• To reduce the incidence of malnutrition through prevention, early detection and Treatment; thereby reducing the incidence of stunting, wasting and associated ill health.

More Details:

1. Training the Health Workers on Nutrition- Sabarkantha Report
2. Spoken Tutorials – These tutorials are aimed at training of field health workers, training of mothers by Health workers, and self trainings ; Link to Online Spoken tutorials in all languages  – CLICK HERE

About Dr. Rupal Dalal and SMDT

Dr. Rupal Dalal, MD, is Director of Maternal & Child Health at SMDT and also Adjunct Faculty for Nutrition at CTARA, IIT Bombay. She has over 2 decades of experience in pediatrics and nutrition. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rupal-dalal-a526b343/?originalSubdomain=in)

Shrimati Malati Dahanukar Trust (SMDT) was established in 1960 to address the community educational needs in Shrirampur, Maharashtra. While continuing to address education, SMDT widened its scope to include women and child welfare and environment & sustainability since 2012.

SMDT has been helping children get their rights to a healthy childhood and access to quality education. By empowering the women and self-help groups it is achieving financial parity among villagers to avail healthcare, education and nutrition. Through its various sustainable initiatives, SMDT is ensuring that we inhabit a healthier environment where animals are treated with as much care and concern as we enjoy.

For more details, visit SMDT website

DR.RUPAL DALAL
Director, Health and Nutrition, Shrimati Malati Dahanukar Trust, (SMDT), Mumbai
(Project – Training of the Trainers – Child Nutrition – age 0 to 3 years)

“WIN Foundation has helped us to achieve our vision of empowering community health care workers on the knowledge of Maternal Infant Young Child Nutrition. This will help them to eradicate malnutrition from India. They have also partly funded Health Spoken Tutorial series on health and nutrition from IIT Bombay which are translated in multiple languages for training of the mothers and health care workers in local language. The excellent results are already being seen in the field.”

User’s Voice: DR. HITESH PRAJAPATI, MO – PHC, Jashwantgadh Sabarkantha, Gujarat

“Mothers experienced that the IIT Spoken Tutorial Video during antenatal is an easy way to teach breastfeeding technique when video is guided by health worker also. After she is guided by health worker once, mother needs to revise it, so this need is fulfilled by video. Sometimes relatives also help by showing the technique through video. Video also helps the health workers to remember things which they may have missed during the demonstration. This audio visual material is very easy to understand for the mothers, relatives and health workers. We also use them for complementary feeding as mother is confused which type of food to give the baby. Also, it is also easy for us to teach mothers in minimal time. Thank You Spoken Tutorial!”