Innovative health alternative, awarded for results in Vaupés

• Sinergias' intervention in Vaupés contributed to reducing under-five mortality in the project area from 3.3% to 0.7%.

  
  

• Prenatal care and growth and development monitoring were guaranteed for all pregnant women.

  
  

• There was a significant decrease in the indigenous suicide rate in the territory.

The organization Sinergias-Alianzas Estratégicas para la Salud y el Desarrollo Social was awarded the Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and Save the Children Innovation in Health prize for its Intercultural Health project, an experience applied in 18 indigenous communities in the department of Vaupés.

This Colombian organization was awarded together with three experiences from Pakistan, India and Nigeria, selected from among more than 170 initiatives submitted worldwide. Sinergias was recognized for its innovative and transformative project, applied in one of the most dispersed departments of Colombia, with complex geographic characteristics and great ethnic and cultural diversity.

Context

• Approximately 67% of the population of Vaupés is recognized as indigenous and belongs to 27 different groups, each with particular cultural characteristics, including different languages.

  
  

• The department currently has only 3 service points to cover more than 250 communities, distributed over an area as large as the sum of the departments of Cundinamarca, Boyacá and Caldas.

  
  

• The isolation and access difficulties of Vaupés are related to the serious situation in terms of maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, which significantly exceeds the national average. The suicide rate, a serious problem in these communities, was 8 times higher than the Colombian average at the time the project was implemented.

Intervention

Sinergias arrived in 2012 in Vaupés to help improve access to quality health services for the population of 18 communities in the rural area of Mitú. This was achieved through the implementation of a primary health care model adapted to the needs of the dispersed rural and local indigenous populations, with emphasis on women and children. The main objective was to reduce maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, prevent and treat a group of neglected infectious diseases and intervene in a latent phenomenon in the department: suicide.

In this process, the foundations were laid for a health model for the indigenous peoples of the area, adapted to local needs with an intercultural approach.

Acciones

• Home visits to each family, identifying health risk factors and generating action plans to mitigate them.

• Micronutrient supplementation for children under 5 years of age and pregnant women.

• Two rounds of mass deworming were carried out to prevent blindness due to trachoma and to control intestinal parasites and other highly prevalent diseases.

• Definition of the nutritional status of children under 5 years of age.

• A methodology was built and validated to understand, study and address suicide in indigenous communities in an intercultural manner.

• This primary health care approach, and all the findings of this process, serve as a basis for the construction of an intercultural health model for the department of Vaupés.

The institutions that took part in the process were Canadian International Development Agency, Pan American Health Organization, International Network for Neglected Infectious Diseases, AbbVie Foundation, Sabin, Presidential Cooperation Agency, the Departmental Health Secretariat, Mitú Municipal Health Secretariat, San Antonio de Mitú Hospital and the Ministry of Health and Social Protection.