Community Health Assessment

Socioeconomic Status and Maternal and Child Health in Rural Tibetan Villages.

Click here for a pdf file of this report.

Tibetan Healing Fund with the guidance of Dr. Kunchok Gyaltsen conducted a community health assessment. This assessment, Socioeconomic Status and Maternal and Child Health in Rural Tibetan Villages was initiated by the Tibetan Healing Fund to provide a basis on which to design and evaluate health, nutrition and social development projects.

The goal of the assessment is to provide information on the lives and health status of the rural Tibetans in Qinghai Province which can be used to develop and expand programs to improve the health of the Tibetan population. To accomplish this goal, Dr. Gyaltsen provided a broad overview for this sample of socio-demographic characteristics, the health-related environment (drinking water, sanitation, hygiene, the availability of health care providers), children's health, women’s health, fertility, and health-related practices (breastfeeding and immunization).

Tibetan Healing Fund conducted a Community Health Assessment, Socioeconomic Status and Maternal and Child Health in Rural Tibetan Villages. Dr. Kunchok Gyaltsen led this project while working with professionals in Tibet and US including UCLA and Columbia University professors and doctoral students. The assessment was published in March 2007 in conjunction with California Center for Population Research, University of California Los Angeles.

The goal is to provide information on the lives and health status of rural Tibetans in Qinghai Province which can be used to design, evaluate and expand health, nutrition and social development programs to improve the lives of the Tibetan population. With this in mind, copies of the assessment were distributed to organizations working in Tibet; it is available online at UCLA and also on our website.

The report provides a broad overview of the socio-demographic characteristics, the health-related environment (drinking water, sanitation, hygiene, the availability of health care providers), children's health, women’s health, fertility, and health-related practices (breastfeeding and immunization). We surveyed 279 Tibetan women.

The study was conducted in sites located in two Tibetan prefectures in Qinghai Province. These two prefectures have a populations of approximately 200,000 to 400,000 people of whom 70 to 90 percent are ethnically Tibetan. We chose the two prefectures because they are fairly typical of the Tibetan areas in Qinghai Province and because of our knowledge of the area.

The results show that 96% of women give birth at home. 95% delivered without the assistance of a trained health personnel. 1% of respondents indicated that a Village Health Worker was present at delivery and only 4% delivered at a township or county hospital. Of the 279 women surveyed, 0% (none) of the women knew or heard of Hepatitis B, STIs, HIV and AIDS. And none of the women know how these infections are contracted or what they could do to protect themselves against the infections. One out of the 279 women said she knew about TB.

In the study population, half of the adult and almost all of the children have attended school at some point. Adults who did attend school completed an average of 5 years and children completed an average of 4 years. While 70% of the children ages 6 to 17 can read and write in Tibetan, only 45% of adults can. Literacy in Chinese is considerably lower: only 34% of children and 13% of adults could read and write in Chinese.

Clearly our training, health education outreach and birth center are critical to improving the health of rural Tibet.

To download a copy of the assessment, click on the above link or the website for the Institute for Social Science Research, California Center for Population Research, University of California, Los Angeles. http://repositories.cdlib.org/ccpr/olwp/CCPR-Special-07/