Dr Angela Chaudhuri, Partner, Swasti was commissioned by the trustees of the Catalyst Group of Institutions, to lead the Catalyst Group COVID19 Response Command Center. Her experience and expertise has been on 7 with a particular focus primary health care for the indigent and vulnerable communities.

Dear Colleagues,

I can’t begin to share how grateful we are for the interest you’ve expressed in collaborating with us in the fight to prevent COVID19 from devastating our communities. Swasti continues to work hard in helping build health systems and community systems as one can’t exist without the other for people centered health care. And this is the time as in any, to garner our strengths to action.

Leveraging our experience of working in humanitarian emergencies like Tsunami, Kerala Floods, Gaja, etc, we have developed and promoted The Covid19 (Response) Action Collaborative – To support stakeholders to collaborate, coordinate and integrate the Covid-19 Response.

While we hope for the best, we know that we must prepare for the worst and hence if you are interested in engaging, please email us at covidaction@swasti.org

This is what Swasti has been upto for the last ten days:

FOR OUR PEOPLE:

1. 1. We’ve moved up the level of caution on our advisory. We are now on Level 3 – Non-essential activities to be avoided. We are taking stock of the situation every single day and adapting our response. The dynamic advisory updated every few hours is at http://bit.ly/Covid19Advisory. It is also available on this site and in several Indian languages so that other social impact organisations can utilize this.

1. The 400++ staff, interns,volunteers and consultants across the Catalyst Group continue to be briefed on the advisory.

FOR OUR COMMUNITIES:

1. A protocol for phone triage and counselling for communities at risk of COVID19 has been developed and tested. We’re in talks with technology partners and agencies to help build a pool of volunteers with language capacity.
2. Our frontline health workers continue to receive the latest COVID updates and re-training on PPE. Additional supplies of PPE will reach them soon.
3. Proposals for community-based rapid COVID testing have gone out. Our aim is for universal community based testing.
4. Proposals for elderly care for the poor have also gone out.
5. Webinars for garment supply chain continues , this week in various vernacular. You can find the schedule here. These will continue till April 10th.
6. An advisory for garment supply chain on actions they can take during the various stages of SARS-COV-2 has been developed and shared with several major brand partners
7. Our team has unique characteristics including those with medical conditions that put them at risk- they have developed a guideline on precautions they take during these times.
8. We have pulled together a multilingual repository of learning and awareness resources on COVID 19, primary health care and WASH for our factory and community partners from relevant sources.

Stay Clean, Stay Safe and Stay Digital.

In solidarity,

Angela