SMC Blue Star network providers are committed to offer quality services to the community. As a part of their noble initiative, some of the Blue Star Providers (BSPs) took initiative to organize a “Growth Monitoring and Promotion (GMP) Campaign" at their own communities with the technical guidance from SMC program operations team.
Considering the importance of child nutrition and their growth monitoring, the campaign was focused to build awareness among the parents of the children under-5 years of age. This practice will eventually increase the volume of nutritional service, enhance access to the service and will help to address the missing opportunities of child nutrition services required by the people in the community.
A total of 15 "GMP campaign" were organized across the country during the period from December’20 to January’21 where about 2,457 parents attended along with their children. Apart from discussing the growth pattern with the parents and counseling on child nutrition with the need for micronutrient supplement (SMC MoniMix), BSPs’ offered multiple child health services during the campaign which included taking measurements, completing the growth chart, distribution of GMP card, referring severe malnutrition cases to the specialists/hospitals along with other limited care.
This special campaign provided micronutrient supplement (MoniMix) services to 1,906 children,amongst them 29 children were identified with different forms of malnutrition together with other complications and were referred to the nearest hospital/specialists.
In this context, Dr. Salah Uddin Ahmed, Head of Training and Service Delivery (TSD), Program Division, said, “This is a very innovative initiative taken by the Blue Star providers with the guidance from our Program Officers (POs) which has created a lot of interest among the parents/caregivers. He further said that we are planning to disseminate this innovative idea among all BSPs for the successful implementation of GMP program as well as overall nutritional activities of SMC.”
