South Asian Health Support Programme

        This is the first project from UCN for the South Asian community in Hong Kong. We started this project as we observed health disparities among this community. Family health is important to improve the health of the whole family, hence we proposed to start a maternal and child health project. 

        Many South Asian women in Hong Kong are housewives and we believe that strengthening health knowledge of mothers will reflect better health of the whole family as they are the ones who usually take care of the family. Though we are focusing on women we don't ignore men.

​

         We have a long history of community health service for the local Chinese community but we had never worked with the South Asian community. We started from the beginning in 2007, with lots of difficulties in the first 6 months with no past linkage with the South Asian Community. In addition, there were no other organisation providing any sort of health service particularly for this community. It was a learning curve for everyone in the organisation.

       However, during the second half of the year we steadily took over. Apart from training women regarding maternal and child health, we also held several outdoor health promotion campaigns. During the mini flu outbreak in early 2008, we did campaign for flu vaccine and provided hundreds of vaccination as majority of the families we came across had never had flu vaccination. Similarly hundred of cervical cancer screening was done for women. 

        We were aware that there is a need for health promotion service among this community but we did not know that there was such a huge demand, we are overwhelmed by the response. However, we are still long way from fulfilling the health needs of the South Asian community in Hong Kong.

        For bringing us to this stage, we would sincerely like to thank community chest, our supporters particularly the Race Relation Unit, United Christian Hospital, Tuen Mun Hospital, our volunteers and all the NGOs serving EM in Hong Kong who helped us in our health promotion services to the needy community.

         We hope that we would be able to continue draw inspiration from our supporters and from the people we serve, as we all continue to work together to foster healthier and harmonious community in Hong Kong.

        Community health is all about people, partnership and multi-sectoral involvement is key to success. We look forward in working together with the community in bringing up the health profile of all.