Healthful Living & Wellness

Medical Home

BSWI’s Medical Home is a team approach to providing total health care awareness. Our medical home team includes health care provider, others who support people, and most importantly – the poorest and the most vulnerable.

People’s Medical Home

  • Helps people manage their health care
  • Helps answer people’s health questions
  • Listens to people’s concerns
  • Works with other medical experts/doctors if necessary
  • Coordinates people’s care through additional services if needed
  • Encourages people to play an active part in their own health care

Working with villagers’ teams improves the quality of their health care and shorten the time it takes to get that care. Currently we are working in this program in 55 villages in the North Bengal and South Bengal zones.

Behavioral Health

We work in the following Family counseling activities in rural areas and urban slums:

  • Individual Counseling (Children and Adults)
  • Group Counseling
  • Couples Counseling
  • Suicide Screenings
  • Residential Treatment Referrals
  • Treatment for Gambling Addiction, Illicit Liquor Addiction; Tobacco Cessation, Eating Disorders, Grief Counseling,

Community Wellness

Cultural Services

  • Community Events
  • Cultural Coordination
  • Men’s Society – The Men’s Society is a weekly gathering of men over the age of 18 years old. The goal is to provide a safe haven for men wishing to share and discuss life’s challenges, as well as life’s many joys.
  • Women’s Society – Women meet weekly who are caring and compassionate and want to support each other.

Health and Wellness

  • Cooking Healthy
  • Fitness Exhibitions
  • Nutritious Food Prescription
  • Kitchen Gardening
  • Health Education

Infant and Parent Services

Traditionally, pregnancy is a sacred state of being. Keeping women and babies safe and healthy has always been an honorable and expected way of life for human beings. When a woman knew she was pregnant, the life inside became her first thought. She was very aware of the need to take care of her health right from the start. BSWI’s Mother & Child Care Program is designed to complement, not replace prenatal, postpartum and pediatric medical care. In addition to providing support and education during pregnancy, there is also a focus on helping women become and stay healthy before and between pregnancies. We affirm the sacred role of women in the community as givers of life, and promote understanding of the importance of family well-being and the health of women throughout the lifespan.

Healthy Start: Our program provides services to families in the remote rural communities with pregnant women and children up to the age of five years. This project is being collaborated with the Government of West Bengal’s Health & Family Welfare Department.

Benefits Assistance

  • Insurance Enrollment and Information: BSWI has ensured that hundred percent of our SHG members’ lives are insured with the TataAIA Life Insurance Schemes. This is a socially accepted and designed scheme where the TataAIA LIC offers attractive returns after the policy is expired and whenever casualties of the insurers happen.
  • Food Assistance & Emergency Energy Relief: We provide emergencies food assistance during pandemics, natural calamities like flood, cyclones etc, This effort also includes support buying groceries on monthly basis.

Sexual Reproductive Health

The stigma attached to sex and sexuality ensures that such issues never enter public discourse, lack of comprehensive sexuality education, inaccessibility, and lack of knowledge around contraceptives, erroneous sex education culminating in unhealthy sexual practices and reproductive ill-health are large issues that plague the youth.

This in turn leads to early marriages, early pregnancy, and severe health issues among girls from vulnerable groups. BSWI’s Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) program aims to empower girls to become drivers of change to make informed decisions about this and also supports their peers to make decisions about sexuality, life goals, reproductive health, and enjoy their Sexual Reproductive Health Rights. To achieve this, BSWI provides the required knowledge and skills to help adolescent girls make informed decisions and actively engage them in designing and monitoring SRH programs. Capacity building of families and communities on SRH helps them to support their children and ability to monitor the quality of SRH services. Secondly, building capacities of families and communities for the better understanding of the needs of girls and support them to realize their rights, and also monitor the quality of SRH services.

Key Actions:

  • Deliver Comprehensive Sex Education to Children and Youth
  • Awareness generation on misconceptions about HIV infection and transmission with prevention using informed choices
  • Capacity building of parents and caregivers on core SRH issues and communicating with their children about SRH
  • Work with communications experts, public figures, youth, and journalists, to campaign on positive use of social media to raise public awareness on SRH
  • Capacity building of community health volunteers, peer educators, teachers on SRH
  • Influence and support state and district authorities to establish menstrual hygiene management in the development and emergency context.

Menstrual Hygiene

BSWI has been working in collaboration with the Government of West Bengal and CSR (TechMahindra ESRO) on menstruation awareness initiatives in South 24 Parganas and Malda district in West Bengal, with the goal of improving the menstrual health of women in four clusters. Our initiatives aim to spread awareness around Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM), break people’s silence on the issue, and provide the clusters’ citizens with sustainable and equitable access to appropriate MHM products. Our program now covers 65 villages from four clusters in two districts and aims to reach 40,000 women, 17,000 teen girls, and 9,500 teen boys. The major activities we have taken up include:

  • Health check-ups: A team of health practitioners check blood pressure, anemia, general health issues, problems related to menstruation, etc. in our central health clinic.
  • Information kiosks: Government departments such as Health, ICDS (nutrition), Family and Child Welfare and various NGO partners are invited to set up information kiosks for their programs and displays.
  • Fun & entertainment: Games and activities are on hand for participants, including art zones, sack races, lemon-and-spoon races and quiz competitions.
  • Street theatre: A section of our Annual Function will be devoted to street theatre performances and film projections on Menstruation Hygiene Management (MHM) related issues.

Awareness Program on Adolescent Health & Sanitation

BSWI is constantly providing adolescent girls awareness regarding their personal health and hygiene through meetings, school-based campaigns and various training and awareness programs. The adolescent girls have improved their personal health and hygiene practices and are achieving good health through our interventions.

Women’s Awareness Generation on Personal Health & Hygiene

Rural women are still unaware about their health, hygiene and sanitation aspects. Lack of awareness, presence of stigma and superstitions etc keep them underdeveloped. Thus they suffer from various health hazards throughout their lives. BSWI works for the rural women by providing health awareness, hygienic education and field-based awareness generation programs.

Celebration of World Health Day

In every year, BSWI observes important national and international days that are hardly observed in this area. Rallies, workshops, exhibitions are often conducted by BSWI for improvement of general public knowledge on the themes.