Giving Compass' Take:

• Mona Korejo shares her experience at Doctors Without Borders in a slum of Pakistan, where she found that engaging with the community to promote daily health practices was the most successful way to advise treatment plans.

• How can other practitioners in all types of medical settings utilize a community engagement, patient-focused approach to promoting health?

• This high school in Albuquerque is already ahead of the curve in preparing their students for the health care industry using project based learning styles.

Mona is a health promotion supervisor working for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in her native Pakistan. Health promoters do vital work with local communities, helping to spread the word about behaviors which can help people stay healthy. Today Mona explains how a creative approach is getting results...

Machar Colony (“Mosquito colony” in the local name) is a big slum of the densely populated city Karachi. I have been working in this slum for more than five years with MSF. Here MSF combines primary health care, including remarkable treatment of Hepatitis C, with empowering and strengthening the community through a behavior change approach. This means helping to share understanding about small actions, like handwashing, which can make a big difference to people's health.

Step by step, little by little, I got known by the community. Their friendly behaviour made me more confident to move forward and start doing health education with local people and groups. By then I had also learned a lot about health myself, and I realized that something as simple as washing hands could save many lives.

Our team want to do more than just to talk one way, giving lectures. We want to do something fun and to show the community practical actions they could take to improve health, so we dressed up in costumes, we put on plays, we even had a puppet show.

We found that if the audience really enjoyed an activity, our health promotion messages are more memorable than just talk and instruction.

Read the full article about promoting health through community engagement by Mona Korejo at Doctors Without Borders