Coastal communities living in our client’s direct area of influence have poor health status and limited access to quality health services despite rapid development due to the oil and gas industry, logging industry, and port and infrastructure developments.
Solution
Montrose carried out a detailed health needs assessment of communities in our client’s area of influence and designed a health programme to address these needs in a sustainable manner.
The needs assessment used a variety of tools (review of routine health information system data, semi-structured interviews with key informants, focus group discussions, site inspections) to determine the priority health issues faced by communities, including among young children, women and other vulnerable groups.
This included documenting perception of health and disease among community members, reviewing accessibility to and quality of health services for each community, and identifying key health hazards in the community.
In addition, Montrose carried out a stakeholder mapping exercise to identify the roles key public, private and civil society stakeholders could play in a health programme.
Impact
Following the needs assessment, Montrose designed a fully costed health programme for the client that focused on high impact health interventions that will result in measurable improvements in the health status of coastal communities.
The programme also worked with the existing health system and leveraged existing stakeholders’ capacity and commitment to support sustainability.
