Wonca Rural South Asia(WoRSA)
Wonca Rural South Asia (WoRSA) is the rural health group with the aim to achieve positive health for all rural people. This group was officially launched on 14th February during WONCA SAR 2016 conference at Colombo, Srilanka.
To fulfill our goals of positive health for all rural citizens, organized and coordinated efforts are needed. There is huge disparity in rural health care and uneven distribution of health resources. About one half of the world’s population lives in rural and remote areas, but this half is served by only one quarter of the world’s doctors and by less than one third of the world’s nurses.3this shows how the resources are concentrated in areas inaccessible to rural people.
In the current scenario we need a concrete plan and set goals to get desired results. To overcome current challenges of rural health must get its due importance and should be advocated among doctors to join and strengthen rural health care. Some immediate and long-term objectives have been set.
Immediate objectives are:-
Engage with young doctors across south Asia region
Create a working group of representatives from each countries having passion for rural health.
Collaborate with local organizations
Strategy for community participation
Rural networking of primary care physicians
Long term objectives:-
Engage with political stakeholders and ensure political commitments
Develop an online database of rural doctors
Create an online portal on rural health
Structured patient oriented database of frequently asked question on disease and prevention
Develop consensus guidelines and model on healthcare
Recently during WONCA – SAR conference, rural health care was one of the main focus of this conference which was highlighted during plenary, guest lectures, and symposium. Apart from the launch of WoRSA, there was a symposium on rural health care. Current challenges, rural health determinants and models to strengthen it were discussed.
Realising the need of primary care research (PCR), we launched our new initiative WoRSA – PCR through which we are engaging with doctors with passion in research to do some multicentric study. Our first study is a KAP study on dengue fever being done at India (Dr. Pratyush Kumar), Sri Lanka (Dr. Erandie, Dr. Sankha, and Dr. Hiranthini), Bangladesh (Dr. Zakiur Rahman) and Pakistan (Dr. Sanam Shah). We are planning to do many such studies in future.
We also have an android app – WoRSA. We have few interesting plans to utilize this platform and disseminate our work and developments. We are going to start with featuring rural health success stories. We have also plans to keep all the presentations done as a part of rural CME as educational resources. We are currently working on creating rural health database (Be a part of WoRSA & fill this online form), publishing quality research papers through our WoRSA – PCR forum, inspiring doctors through our WoRSA – rural health success stories and campaign #4ruralheath in the pipeline.
Our group has been noticed and reported in the editorial by President Michael Kidd and CEO Garth Manning in WONCA new letter. We have also got opportunity to write for “Rual Round-up”. As WoRSA chair it’s an honor to be a featured doctor at WONCA website. WoRSA aims to engage with family doctors and promote research, develop practice guidelines and advocate rural health on various platforms. There is need of collective effort which can be achieved through professional networking in bringing doctors to the forefront of policy and decision making.
We do understand that this is just the beginning and there is a long way to go but with a team effort, we will be able to achieve our goals in the shortest possible time. We also need to coordinate with family physicians academy/federations/associations of every country in order to request them to nominate and encourage doctors to join this movement and share their innovative ideas.
We would like to thank Dr. John Wynn-Jones and Dr. Raman Kumar for supporting this initiative. We truly appreciate everyone else for their support and contribution to this group.
Contacts
Twitter – @WoRSAcares
Facebook - www.facebook.com/groups/WoRSA/
Chair –Dr. Pratyush Kumar