Biology · Ch 3 — Reproductive Health
Reproductive and Child Health Care (RCH) Programmes and Reproductive Health Education
Reproductive and Child Health Care (RCH) Programmes and Reproductive Health Education
A country cannot improve its reproductive health merely by building more hospitals; awareness has to reach people well before they need medical care, and it has to be accurate. India's national effort in this direction has taken two closely related forms — structured government programmes, and reproductive health education delivered more broadly through schools, community health workers, and the media.
On the programme side, the Reproductive and Child Health Care (RCH) approach represented an important shift in how the government organised its efforts. Rather than treating family planning, maternal care, child immunisation and the control of sexually transmitted diseases as separate schemes, RCH brought them together as parts of one continuous service reaching a woman and her family from before conception through pregnancy, delivery, and the child's early years. In practical terms this has meant a steady expansion of antenatal check-ups, encouragement of institutional (hospital or health-centre) deliveries attended by trained personnel rather than unsupervised home births, wider availability of immunisation for infants, and easier access to a range of contraceptive choices along with counselling on how to use them correctly. West Bengal's public health system, like that of other states, delivers these RCH-linked services through primary health centres, sub-centres and hospitals, working within the framework set by national policy. …
Worked out. A well-designed reproductive health education programme, whether delivered through the school curriculum, community health workers or the mass media, is expected to cover several linked strands rather than a single narrow topic: the structure and normal working of the male and female reproductive systems; the physical, hormonal and emotional changes that accompany adolescence and puberty; safe, hygienic and responsible sexual practices; the different available methods of contraception, their correct use and their relative reliability; the common sexually transmitted diseases, how they spread and how they can be prevented; the importance of antenatal check-ups, a hygienic and medically supervised delivery, and postnatal care of both mother and newborn; and the value of treating male and female partners as equally responsible for reproduction-related decisions, including family size and birth spacing. Delivered in an age-appropriate, factual a …