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Acting in Slums:
Giving Health Education to Those Who Need It Raif Restivo Simão & Tiago Kietzmann & Guilherme Jaime de Castro IFMSA - Brazil Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo raifsimao@hotmail.com Nowadays, slums are one of the most important problems Brazil faces. These are areas that lack many basic facilities, such as safe drinking water, basic sanitation, garbage collection, public transport and security, factors that significantly increase the local population disease risk. People living in these areas usually do not have access to education, health and other rights, which decreases their quality of life. It is a human right to be aware of the disease risks and how to cope with them, according to the culture, resources available and the physical aspects of the community where each person lives. In this sense, actions related to health education would improve the local population empowerment, allowing them to adapt their daily activities according to their reality, in order to decrease their disease risks. Furthermore, health education is a mighty tool for health promotion. Every doctor today must possess the ability to educate people effectively, in a way that is comprehensible by a lay person.It is a well known fact that any health promotion intervention has the best cost benefits than the disease itself or its treatment, for both, individuals and the health system.
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Having that in mind, we went to the ‘Comunidade do Murão’, a slum which is in the process of getting urbanized, yet, having some deeply vulnerable areas thriving. It is located in São Paulo´s metropolitan area, the seventh most populous area in the world. There, we planned a cycle of meetings with the local population, aiming to debate on some important daily life topics and associated health risks. To achieve this goal, we took two main points into account; short-listing the subjects of prime interest for discussion and targeting those subjects in the debate to zero down to a common solution.
In order to short-list the subjects, we surveyed the local population asking them to point out the target areas, which according to them needed discussion. We had five meetings in totality.The topics of discussion were: women health, water- borne diseases, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia. The meetings were conducted every Saturday, in the afternoon, when people were relatively free from work and could be a part of the entire discussion. In every meeting, the participants were divided into subgroups; each subgroup comprising at least three to four students, who had previously researched on the topics of debate for at least two weeks. Each sub- group spoke about the specific aspects of the main subject for about 20 to 30 minutes, following which the participants would then rotate and discuss the other aspects of the subject with another student group. The intervention was based on the questions posed by the students, to the attendants of the discussion, in an attempt to build on their previous knowledge and raise awareness on that topic. The participants and students together, planned some behavioural transformation, in order to reduce the health risks of the people living in the slum. About a hundred residents in that area took part in the project. The number exceeded our best expectation. The response was overwhelming. The community is getting more and more involved with the meetings, and the attendants have become replicators, spreading new knowledge far and wide. Something as basic as health education has the potential of changing a lot of lives. With projects like these; ‘acting inside the slums’, we can mark the beginning of a big change in the lives of the people residing in the slums.
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