Savithri Devi Memorial Charitable Trust
This trust was established in 2010 in the memory of Late Mrs. Savithri Devi who was the wife of the renowned freedom fighter and ex-INA Sri U Sunder Rao. She passed away on 20th April 2005 at the age of 71. She is survived by her 3 married daughters. Her 2nd daughter Mrs Lata S Rao leads this trust. The objective of the trust is to help the poor and needy make a decent living through empowering them by educating and making them self-reliant. Also the trust aims to provide medical assistance to the patients who can’t afford the expenses; to help the mentally challenged and provide free scholarships for the deserving students from the underprivileged sections of the society to run old age homes and to establish orphanages. The trust also promotes activities for cancer prevention and tobacco control programs across the state.
To know more visit www.sdmctrust.org
Cancer Prevention and Outreach Programme
Health care is a priority for all individuals. However, the rising cost of healthcare and increasing sophistication of healthcare industry has made it difficult for medical care facilities to be universally available at affordable costs. Most of the patients who belong to the low socio economic strata find it impossible to meet the financial demands of healthcare. Treatment in their cases not only bears the costs of healthcare for the individual but also other hidden costs to the family, such as travel to city, accommodation expenses and several other intangible problems which further add to the mental and economic burden.
It is with this background that SDMC trust set up the rural outreach programme to take health care to the periphery of the country. Presently, this outreach programme has targeted rural areas in vicinity of smaller towns where medical facilities is available but clearly lacks expertise. Our team of surgeons travels to these centers and carry out procedures in the hospital.
Rural Outreach Programme
We have been performing the tobacco control programs in rural Bengaluru as a part of the social initiative. This rural outreach programme was initiated with NGO’s working in villages in the vicinity of Bengaluru. Various NGO’s are working to improve the health care delivery in the villages by conducting regular camps. However, these health camps culminate in doctors visiting the villages and diagnosing ailments or treating them at best. In this exercise, however, one misses out the important note, what causes these ailments? A vast majority of them are related to habits (Tobacco – rampant in villages, alcohol), hygiene or diet. Hence this was a sincere effort towards treating the cause rather than its effect.
In this program doctors volunteer to participate in the rural outreach programme and visit the villages. Awareness on the hazards of tobacco is created using PowerPoint presentation illustrating the ill effects of tobacco and its dire consequences. The villagers are motivated into quitting the habit by discussing the diseases one may acquire after consumption and the economic losses to individual and families for treating the illness. These counseling sessions are done from house to house, as a part of group discussion involving 2-3 families and are conducted in the houses, at school veranda or any accessible public place.
