The first 1000 days of a newborn are very critical for their health and growth. Addressing the essentiality of better provision of quality of care, Government of India (GoI) institutionalized a novel initiative of Home Based Care of the Young Child (HBYC).
Home Based Care of the Young Child program is to improve health and nutrition of young children through home visits by frontline workers throughout the critical first 1000 days. In continuation to the Home-Based Newborn Care Program wherein community health workers make 6/7 home visits to newborn in the first 6 weeks, the HBYC envisages additional 5 home visits to families of under twos to maintain the continuum of care from birth till 2 years.
The objective of the HBYC program is to reduce child mortality and morbidity, improve nutrition status, growth and early childhood development of young children through structured, focused and effective home visits by frontline workers. HBYC has been envisaged as a convergent platform that promotes complementary feeding, growth monitoring, vaccination, Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) practices and care during sickness through focused counselling. The program attempts to plug the design gaps in the health and nutrition programs for children.
The state of Jharkhand has prioritized HBYC as a critical intervention to help improve infant and young child survival for all its 24 districts. USAID Vriddhi project, as technical partner to the state, has been helping the state to operationalize the program in 3 Aspirational Districts Lohardaga, Simdega and West Singhbhum more intensively.
A detail operation plan, hand book for home visit and training module has been developed for implementing HBYC. HBYC training module is of 5 days duration. The training consists of lectures, demonstrations and skill stations. In March 2020, COVID 19 pandemic disturbed the entire training process as traveling and physical meetings are challenging. Providing solutions, USAID Vriddhi project has prepared an Electronic Version of this 5 days training which can be imparted by trainers from remote control – sitting at state NHM or from their residence.The IMNCI videos are part of this E IMNCI module.
The E sessions are prepared based on the ASHA training handbook and the training schedule. The E sessions will be done in 3 days and each day sessions will be of 6 hours. The trainers/facilitators will use zoom /any other platform to share the session.
The participants are provided with hard copy of module and other materials and meet at block HQ or any other site for the training and someone like BPM or Block Training Team (BTT) will facilitate the sessions there with help of a TV monitor or screen with compliance of precautionary measures. This app/e-module can also be downloaded to individual ASHAs in their smartphone also. Link to E-HBYC Module: https://cdn-esim.contentservice.net/adapt-ss/LGH/courses/HBCY-Hindi/latest/index.html#/
