Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI)

Programs

Society for Assistance to Hearing Impaired Children (SAHIC)

last updated Apr 5, 2013

Overview

Implementing organization: 
National Center for Hearing and Speech for Children (NCHSC)
Legal Status: 
Private (not-for-profit)
Year Launched: 
February 1987
Stage: 
Existing/expansion stage
Income Level of Target Population: 
All income levels

Funding

Primary Source of Funding: 
Donor
Additional Source(s) of Funding: 
Out-of-pocket payments
Funders: 
Andheri-Hilfe Bonn, CARITAS Bangladesh

Scale

Personnel Employed: 
50-99
Number of Clients Served: 
180,445 are children below the age of 15 and 349,582 are adults
Summary: 

Society for Assistance to Hearing Impaired Children (SAHIC) runs mobile rural ear camps that focus on prevention, detection, and treatment of hearing impairments especially in children and also offer ENT (ear, nose, and throat) treatment in remote rural villages. In addition, SAHIC operates a hospital specializing in ENT and head and neck treatment/surgeries; the hospital services all Bangladeshi citizens, providing subsidies to poor patients.

Key program components: 

Society for Assistance to Hearing Impaired Children (SAHIC) is a voluntary non-government organization established in February 1987 for prevention, early detection and rehabilitation of the hearing impaired, especially children in Bangladesh.

Ear Camps: The Society's first project was the Mobile Rural Ear Camp organized in February 1990 at Kaligonj, Gazipur. The ear camp reached out to the poor patients of the remote villages of the country who are unable to seek help for their illness due to financial and communication problems. They established a centre of excellence at Dhaka to train doctors and paramedics for effective prevention, early detection and rehabilitation of hearing impairment, especially in children and treatment of ENT (ear, nose, and throat) diseases that may cause hearing impairment amongst the population.

ENT Hospital: The hospital began operations in July 1990, with 20 general beds and 8 cabins, undertaking all types of ENT and Head & Neck surgery, including microsurgeries in a well-equipped operation theatre. Almost every year, experts in the field of microsurgery from abroad visit the hospital to perform advanced surgeries. The aim of the services is to satisfy the need of the patients at any cost. The operation charges are fixed at a rate affordable to the common people on the basis of actual cost of materials and staffing. 20% to 100% subsidy is available to the poor and destitute patients upon verification of inability to pay the charges fixed by the authority. These facilities are open to all citizens of Bangladesh.

Program history: 

SAHIC is the brain child of Prof M. Nurul Amin, DLO; FRCSS, FCPS an eminent ENT specialist of the country and established the society with like minded dedicated friends and social workers with only five thousand Bangladeshi currency(BDT) capital as personal contribution of him in 1987. The aims and objectives of the society was to prevent an early detect hearing impairment, to treat the diseases that may cause hearing impaiorment and rehabilitation of hearing impaired, specially children. The idea was concieved from personal experience as a practicing ENT specialist seeing the problem of hearing impairment amongst the population, specially children, leading many of them to live a disabled life. It was conceived with the UNO declaration and WHO resolution passed in the General Assembly of 1986 about the hearing disability and identification of ear infection as the major cause of hearing impairment (about 65% of the total hearing impairment / deafness) which are preventable and avoidable.

The Centre received the affiliation of Hearing International (H.I.), International Federation of Otorhinolaryngological Society (IFOS) and International Society of Audiologists (I.S.A.) due to satisfactory services rendered to the needy patients in the year 1997, and working in close cooperation with those international organizations, as well as WHO Society received a lot of in-kind support such as instruments, equipment, books, training of personnel from WHO for the National Centre for Hearing & Speech for Children, Specialized ENT Hospital, Hearing test laboratory and library.

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