Aquinas Edassery

Founder

Aquinas Edassery is the founder of Swasthya Swaraj [1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and tribal welfare from Bhawanipatna.

Aquinas Edassery, whose given name is Jemma Joseph Edassery, is an Indian physician and Catholic religious sister who founded Swasthya Swaraj, a secular not-for-profit organisation providing health care and health education to tribal communities in the Thuamul Rampur block of Kalahandi district, Odisha.

She began the work in her early sixties, after a career in hospital medicine, moving from Bengaluru to one of the least served parts of Odisha. Swasthya Swaraj runs a comprehensive community health programme built around clinical services and the training of local people as health workers.

Career

Edassery holds an MD in medicine and worked in secondary and tertiary care hospitals, latterly at St John's Hospital in Bengaluru, before turning to community health. She had earlier run grassroots health work in the Kollegal area of rural Karnataka, where she saw maternal and child mortality fall after community health workers were trained.

She came to Kalahandi in 2013 and, after an exploratory year, registered Swasthya Swaraj as a society in 2014 with two colleagues, Sister Angelina Thomas, a laboratory technician, and Sister Biji Mery, a nurse. The organisation received incubation support from the SELCO Foundation in Bengaluru; Yogesh Jain suggested the organisation's name and Harish Hande, the founder of SELCO, was its first president.

Swasthya Swaraj operates clinics in Thuamul Rampur block and, as reported in 2017, served around 14,000 people across some 76 villages. A central element of the model is the training of young tribal women as primary health care providers in their own villages and of young men as health communicators, so that communities can meet their own basic health needs. The organisation states that it has no church affiliation and that its services are not provided on a religious basis.

Edassery serves as secretary on the governing board of Swasthya Swaraj Society.[2][3][4][5][6]

Swasthya Swaraj

Swasthya Swaraj runs the Swasthya Swaraj Comprehensive Community Health Programme in the tribal-dominated Thuamul Rampur block of Kalahandi district, delivering clinical healthcare through local centres while building community capacity for sustainable health outcomes.

Swasthya Swaraj reports the following, on its own site:

Worked across 78 villages and hamlets drawn from 7 gram panchayats of Thuamul Rampur block, Kalahandi district, Odisha in 2019-20.
Its two 24x7 health centres at Kaniguma and Kerpai saw 11,411 patients in 2019-20, including 8,263 women and children and 2,527 under-five children.
Trained 72 tribal women as 'Swasthya Sathis' — frontline health workers in tribal villages — under a three-year curriculum with ongoing training (2019-20).