JSS Charitable Activities

Friends of Jan Swasthya Sahyog in UK

JSS charitable activities

Who We Are & What We Do...

We are a UK based doctors, friends of JSS who aspire to help people of our motherland and lift the standard of medical care provisioning in rural India.

Jan Swasthya Sahyog, has been working over the last 5+ years on developing health related technologies for health care needs of the people with limited resources. JSS strives to ensure that these technologies be as accurate, as the prevailing ones. The aim is to keep it simple, acceptable, cheap, and, applicable in low-resource settings such as in the rural and community levels. The hope is that they can be used by the all levels of health workers especially the most peripheral health workers. It's an attempt to make diagnosis more rational and reduce the misuse of drugs.

Kits are fabricated for initial laboratory validation under controlled conditions against the gold standard. Once validated, these kits are made available to limited organizations for field validation after training. If validated, these kits are available for general use. The products are available for purchase at almost production cost and training is also provided for the same.

We are not far behind in making a significant improvement in the lives of millions of rural Indians.

"Does she not look like one of the actresses right out of a Satyajit Ray movie?"- Dr.Yogesh Jain

She was admitted for appendicular perforation (her appendix had ruptured after her appendicitis had apparently gone untreated), for which she underwent a major surgical procedure.

Her hospital stay was further complicated by severe infection. This photo was taken 2 days before she was finally discharged.

Incidentally, she is about to get married, and her groom-to-be came to check on her in the hospital on this day.

Nurse's Pledge Day: chalo jalayein deep wahaan, jahaan abhi bhi andhera ho...

The first batch of Nursing students have given their final exams. all 25 of them passed, 21 of them scored 1st distinction,the best performance by an ANM school in Chhatisgarh.

Mr.Parmanand, our administration head, had organised the whole function with Florence Nighingale. We shared a vision, to help an entire village, expectant in hope. - Dr Raman Kataria, a man of few words.

A peek into Dr Yogesh Jan and his passion to make a difference in lives of many in rural India.

Dr. Yogesh Jain, founder of JSS takes care of a very undernourished patient.
Hunger and under-nutrition are deep problems in this part of India. A 2002 study in Bilaspur found that 41% of men and 43% of women had a BMI (body mass index) of less than 18.5. People with a BMI under this threshold are considered to be underweight.

Dr. Yogesh Jain, founder of JSS takes care of a very undernourished patient. Hunger and under-nutrition are deep problems in this part of India. A 2002 study in Bilaspur found that 41% of men and 43% of women had a BMI (body mass index) of less than 18.5. People with a BMI under this threshold are considered to be underweight.

There's no getting used to LOVE like that...

Blog by Brett Lewis, Coordinator, Global Health Core

I'm writing from a hospital in rural central India, where I'm spending several months as a volunteer at Jan Swasthya Sahyog (People’s Health Support Group), an organization that runs a hospital and various community services in a marginalized tribal region of Chhattisgarh state. I've never been around so many sick patients- every day I see people with tuberculosis or cancer or kidney disease- and so much malnutrition. I don’t really know what to make of so much acute on chronic pain. I remember the first day I got here, I witnessed a woman with a muscle eating bacteria get her dressing changed. I could see the whites of the bones in her leg, yet when the doctor scrubbed at her open wound, she didn't make a sound. She just lay there, her eyes gently closed. When I asked the doctor how she didn't cry out, he told me that she was used to it. “She’s used to the pain,” was what he said.

That phrase has stuck with me, as I witness person after person enduring a level of physical suffering I can’t even imagine. I see patients with tuberculosis struggle to breathe as if underwater; they are so wasted, I don’t know how their ribs do not crack under the strain. I see cancer patients come in at such advanced stages of their illness that there is often little we can do for them. Even for those who have not yet reached a metastatic stage, they are so malnourished that their bodies are unable to handle effective doses of chemotherapy. At times, I can’t help but wonder what made some patients finally come in to see a doctor, after suffering from their condition for so long. Perhaps there’s a point when enough is enough. Or maybe it is simply chance- that an opportunity had arisen and they had taken it.

Doctors & Hospital Care in Rural India

World famous photographer Tom Pietrasik capturing the life at JSS. Watch more at www.tompietrasik.com

"Phulwari" to address the problem of under nutrition in children

It has been consistently shown that under nutrition- both severe and non severe is the underlying cause for over 50% of the mortality in children under age 5.

Under nutrition in early childhood leads to life long poor intellectual development, poor work capacity as adults, thus keeping them in a poverty trap. Undernourished girls who grow into weak mothers give birth to under weight babies, thus maintaining the vicious cycle of poverty and ill health.

In order to address the problem of under nutrition in children, JSS started a programme of setting up of "Phulwari", aimed to provide a crèche facility to all children in the age group of 6 months to 3 years at the village level wherein supplementary nutritional food plus overall development inputs are provided.

The Phulwari is run by a woman selected by the community. Ther is one woman for every ten children. Some villages have more than one crèche, and some crèches have up to 30 children.

The crèche co-ordinators are given some orientation training on the basics of health and hygiene, and how to run the crèche. During their monthly meetings the functioning of the crèche is reviewed, supplies are replenished and some health teaching is done.

Children are given one cooked meal and two snacks of a high protein-high energy mixture called "sattu" during the five to six hours that they are in the crèche. This is prepared by women's groups in one cluster of villages, and is purchased by JSS for distribution to the crèches. Sometimes, children are provided with an egg on two days a week. Crèches have also been provided with toys to stimulate learning. However, our early child education initiatives need strengthening.

The response to the crèches has been largely positive. Parents feel that it fulfils one of their main needs - when they have to go out to work. With the implementation of the NREGA, the demand for crèches has increased.

Timing of the crèche varies as per the requirement of the community: in summer when NREGA work begins at 4 am to avoid the heat of midday, the crèche starts functioning at that time! Women with very young children return to the crèche twice a day to breast feed their children.

Most villagers prefer to leave their children behind in the village in the custody of a woman they trust, in a safe environment, where food and water are available. They say that they cannot take their children to the worksite as most often there is no shelter there, or it is under a plastic sheet that heats up during the day. Water is often in short supply, and the children are in danger of getting injured if not closely supervised. Their mud work often generates a lot of dust, which they don't want to expose their children to.

Many parents have seen that children who start complementary foods in the crèche after six months do not fall ill and do well. They have started giving supplementary food at home as well. Several children who had dropped out of school for sibling care have returned to school after the crèche facility has been made available in their village.

​Friends of Jan Swasthya Sahyog in UK