Mini Doctors

 Impact India has instituted a program where one child is the “health commissioner” over ten of his or her friends. Weekly checkups are given to see if the group is staying healthy and those findings are then reported back to the child’s family and then community doctor. We got to visit this program and I watched the children gather in a circle as the health commissioner of that group would grab his or hers friends hands and look at their nails to see if they are clean and then rotate their ears to check for wax. While observing this, the word that came to mind was accountability.

The health commissioner was there is make everyone accountable for keeping in good health. I thought it was such a clever and innovative way to engage children in their health at an early age. It was making them aware of health issues and empowering them to change their behavior in order to get better marks from the health commissioner, which in turn was benefiting their health. Behavior is noted as being the hardest aspect to change in the realm of public health. One reason for this is the challenge to make a person consistently engage in a certain action or behavior. When someone is not held accountable on regular basis, it is easy for the individual to become lax and disengaged. The theory behind having the weekly health commissioner checkups is to reinforce participating in healthy behaviors on a daily basis. At ten years old these children are learning better habits and becoming more knowledgeable about their own health than perhaps their parents. This program gives the hope of setting a precedent for healthier generations to come.