Ties up with Plan India to create public awareness
AstraZeneca, a science-led biopharmaceutical company, and Plan India, an NGO striving to improve the lives of millions of children and young people, signed an MoU to expand its ‘Young Health Programme’ (YHP) in the state of Karnataka.
YHP aims to reduce the uptake of unhealthy behaviours in young people to improve their health outcomes as adults and help address the growing burden of NCDs on health systems. YHP established 15 ‘Health Information Centres’ in Delhi, two in Chennai and will be launching three in the communities around Mahadevpura, Dasarahalli and Yelahanka in Bengaluru. In this first year in Karnataka, YHP aims to reach 50,000 adolescents and build a strong foundation to scale up the project in the years to come.
AstraZeneca is complementing YHP with ‘New Normal Same Cancer’ and ‘Ganga Godavari Initiative’ that focuses on creating a mass scale cancer-related awareness with the help of ambassadors and partners such as the Indian Cancer Society and Banaras Hindu University. Under these initiatives, multiple cancer screening camps are conducted in remote areas of the country where not many facilities are available.
Dr Ravi Kumar, Senior Regional Director, MOHFW, Govt of India, who addressed the audience and spoke about the role of awareness and early intervention in defeating cancer: “We are all dealing with a pandemic for the past two years which made it natural for us all to focus on curbing its spread as much as possible. But equal focus is needed towards generating right awareness and understanding about lifestyle related diseases and adolescents is the right group to target if we need to safeguard our future. I am glad that organisations are joining hands towards the same to propel knowledge on this subject across more and more parts of the country.
