Optimising Health Interventions through Social Mapping

At many stages in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of a health intervention social mapping can be a useful tool. A social map identifies the location of high-risk communities, natural barriers, major concentration of the population, location of different types of healthcare providers and distance from health facilities and other variables such as topography, proximity, village commons, community centre, etc.

Social mapping being a participatory tool opens vistas for the community to visualize entire village at once, identify damp / humid location or favourable habitat which may serve breeding ground for vectors, houses with recent history of vector-borne disease cases, houses of ASHA/ ANM/ Mukhiya and other key influencers for getting help in referral of suspected case, diagnosis, treatment and post treatment support.?

Mapping also helps villagers and project staff to get rough distances from nearest public health facility and infer cost and commuting time in reaching the facility.? Social maps help project managers in monitoring activities by cross checking the sites where activities were planned and actually conducted with expected threshold population.?

As villages are dynamic entities (increase in population, construction of new houses, people in-migration / out migration, decrease or increase in the number (houses with) of suspected, confirmed and treated cases, social maps need to be updated at regular intervals to reflect changes.

We realised the practical use of such mapping when we employed the technique in 295 Kala-Azar hotspot villages in Bihar and Jharkhand. Social mapping greatly improved efficiency and effectiveness in planning, implementation and monitoring of Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) activities in these villages.