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Home-care now a call away

If you need help at home to attend to your ailing or elderly family members, just dial 01755660025.

A private body, Good Heal Trust, in partnership with the country's largest healthcare network, the Diabetic Association of Bangladesh (DAB), is now offering care service for Dhaka residents for a nominal charge.

A group of young women have been trained to look after the elderly at home, in hospitals, or clinics.

They will ensure the prevention of bedsores, monitor blood pressure and blood glucose.

They will also carry physical samples for diagnostic tests, making life easy for many families that find it difficult to move their elderly members through a crowded, often gridlocked, city.

These trained women will make arrangements for home visits by doctors and physiotherapists.

Services like feeding, toileting, bathing, and dressing are also being offered.

“Demand goes up”

As people live longer these days than any time before, lifestyle diseases needing constant attention are also surfacing.

The latest Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey has found that one in nine people aged 35 years and above is diabetic, while one in three women and one in five men of the same age group suffers from high blood pressure.

But home healthcare service is not well established in Bangladesh.

“We get many requests for nurses at home. But we are unable to help because of adequate manpower,” Diabetic Association President Prof AK Azad Khan told bdnews24.com.

He said that the demand for such services was rising with an increase in the number of ageing people. “We value elderly people in our society. So we care for them and need someone to look after them."

Tanvir Raquib, Executive Director of the trust that works to improve the quality of healthcare in Bangladesh, said once their home-based services become popular in Dhaka, they will be offered in other parts of Bangladesh.

“It also opens up employment opportunity for women,” he said. The women the trust has trained were ‘educated but unemployed’.

“We gave them extensive training and then put them through a test before giving them assignments,” he said.

The trust would hold a diabetes and blood-pressure screening programme on Saturday at the Dhaka Officer’s Club, where Health Secretary MM Neazuddin is expected to be present.
Source - bdnews24.com