Summary

The Christian Hospital Chandraghona (CHC) started as a small health centre, initially provided clinic-based primary health care, and slowly grew into the main referral centre for Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and a portion of the neighbouring upazilas of Chittagong District.

Program goals

CHC seeks to provide curative and preventative healthcare services that better serve its surrounding communities. The Community Health Program is central to the CHC, thus outreach to more remote and poorer communities is a critical part of their mandate. The hospital offers general medical, surgical, paediatric and obstetric care, as well as a complete package of care for pregnant women, beginning in the community with antenatal care and check-ups. It also works with the Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA) to achieve closer understanding and trust to improve maternal care in the community.

Key program components

General Service Provision: CHC offers round-the-clock emergency care. Two doctors are on emergency duty at all time – first and second on call. To provide care to the poor, CHC is offering all services at a subsidised cost. Apart from that, the hospital also has a scheme through which treatment is offered free of charge to the poorest who cannot afford to pay. Both outpatients and inpatients have benefited from this scheme.

Community Health Program: CHC's Community Health Program (CHP) serves nearly 50,000 individuals residing in over 150 disperse remote villages in the hills of Kaptai and Rangunia Upazial of the Rangamati District. The CHP ensures community participation by recruiting community health workers called Basic Medical Workers from villages in order to create and maintain a database of health information about each household in the program area. Health workers regularly visit homes to keep villagers informed about various primary care issues, including the national vaccine program, prenatal and post natal care, nutrition, family planning, quick management of diarrhea, respiratory infection, malaria and other common ailments.

A mobile health team regularly visits each village, offering diagnostic services for prenatal women, malaria tests, and other services. The local health workers keep families up to date on the schedule of the mobile care facility, encouraging them to use the preventive and curative services offered, and refer them when necessary to hospital. Click here to read more about the community health program on CHMI's Blog.

Provider Training: To ensure quality, CHC has instituted an internal Continuing Medical Education Program for staff. Meetings are held every 2 weeks for medical staff and once every month for all staff. The subject-matter of the meetings is arranged in rotation including clinical presentations, journal reviews, mortality and case record reviews and audits. Each meeting is led by one of the hospital's medical officers or (in the case of general staff meetings) by a senior member from one of the other clinical departments (eg CHP.). The facility has thus been able to inform all clinical staff about the work of other departments and also keep them up to date with developments from the wider world of medicine.

This hospital was established in 1907 by the Baptist Missionary Society, U.K. Initially a small dispensary, it was to act as a temporary hospital while foundations were laid for a new red brick hospital. Construction of a new facility began in 1998 in order to replace the original 90 year old structure, which became unsafe to use. With financial assistance from EED of Germany and ICCO of the Netherlands, work on the new hospital was completed in 2002 in three phases. The new hospital building was opened on January, 3, 2003.