Pratyush Kumar on a Health Calendar for family doctors

Dr Pratyush Kumar, well known energetic leader of the WONCA South Asia Rural group (WoRSA) and Organising Secretary for the coming WONCA World Rural health conference in India has developed a health calendar for the new year.

When asked "Why a calendar?" Pratyush replied:

“This whole idea of calendar came when I realised that suddenly by the end of year everyone starts looking for a new calendar. These calendars anyhow attract our attention very often.

So I thought that this could be a very powerful medium with a far outreach for health promotion and awareness.

I worked on common health topics relevant to general population - keep it simple and colourful without overcrowding it with too much information.

I managed to keep most health topics in the month its observed as a day or week (like 24th March which is Tuberculosis day).

I wanted to highlight gender equality out of the SDGs (January), as most of these diseases get lots of coverage, but gender equality as a health issue is much less discussed, although its vital to transform healthcare. Immunisation is highlighted but I have also put a few basic health tips like regular antenatal visits and iron and folic acid supplementation. We still have little more than 50% of antenatal coverage and vaccination coverage and around 40% of maternal mortality is directly or indirectly linked with anaemia.

There are some important health issues which I couldn’t include - hopefully next time.”

Pratyush is planning to translate it in different languages.

Download full year calendar