Improvement of the quality of health care is a dynamic and ever demanding area. As the issue involves both the care givers and the recipients, it is imperative that the system should evolve a mechanism of getting these two poles in a common platform of understanding and acting with the provision of effective communication between the two ends. This is a highly challenging job especially in a country with enormous and extremes of geo-socio-economic diversities.

To achieve a tenable and visible positive change mere recognizing the problem is not enough; a physician needs to get into the issue in depth both at the macro and micro structure of the problem at his or her social arena in order to act positively. Getting to the grass root with sincerity and simplicity will help in a spontaneous development of the skill of addressing the problem with one's limited or unlimited capabilities. If a systematic approach is added to it, the harvest can be multiplied.

Our institute, with its extremely limited physical resources, has experienced this fact in its recent benevolent ventures of rural COPD education and training program at Birbhum. This program got a big encouragement initially by the Chest Foundation Award from the American College of Chest Physicians in 2009. Initially, we did not have any desire for a proper scientific study with objective data analysis at the backend. With the help of a locally acting organization, we had been able to motivate and gather patients from different villages with the suspected disease, identify COPD in the camps through spirometry, examine them clinically, educate and train them on the basic issues related to treatment and rehabilitation for the disease.

With time again, this lead us to a tremendously rewarding and honest self-appreciation that resulted in adding a systematic approach and introduction of the use of visual analogue scale to the recording format. The addition had yielded a rewarding insight again. The analysis of the small data demonstrates significant improvement in symptomatology and the appreciation of the overall improvement in the well being by the patients themselves. (see our article in page no. 5-9 ).

We had also enjoyed a wonderful interaction with our rural folks. All this were possible by proper training and mobilization of the right manpower from locally and from our institute. Further introduction more objective parameters were subsequently done and we wish to show the impact in future. To our mind, dissipating the disease related education, introducing the best possible treatment and rehabilitation at a particular ground reality demands motivation and synergistic efforts in a systematic fashion with appropriate and the best use of the local human resources. At the end, what we have realized that things can be done with honest and organized efforts and the demand for such interventions is tremendous at our rural areas.

Dr. Parthasarathi Bhattacharyya
Institute of Pulomocare and Research
CB- 16, Salt Lake Sector – 1
Kolkata - 700064
Email: parthachest@yahoo.com