News & Updates

COVID Action Collab (CAC) with Crypto Relief Foundation is hosting learning and networking meetings to understand all the solutions and innovations that support COVID-19 response among vulnerable communities. Here is how some of the member organizations are responding based on the learnings from the first and second waves of COVID-19.

1. NIMHANS

National Institute of Mental Health & Neuroscience (NIMHANS) set up an IVRS-based Helpline during the first wave of COVID-19 and continues to address mental health needs:

• 600 volunteers across I1ndia are serving as first-line respondents who address language barriers as well
• Trained counselors and psychiatry, and social work students of NIMHANS are being engaged
• Cases requiring expert interventions are escalated to NIMHANS' expert panel
• Over 600,000 calls were received during the first two waves. Experts intervened in nearly 60,000 cases

Helpline Number: 080-46110007

For more information: https://nimhans.ac.in/pssmhs-helpline/

2. Community Science Alliance

Community Science Alliance is a group of clinicians, public health leaders, academicians, health policy experts who work together for COVID care in low resource settings. Their key interventions include:

• Guidelines for oxygen use in rural and tribal settings
• Behavioral modifications through community influencers
• Rural medicine fellowships with community-based organizations (CBO) and healthcare innovators
• Community of Practice meetings where CBOs share learnings from decades of work as well as recent learnings from COVID care

For more information, please visit: https://science.swasth.app/ or read here.

3. Heartfulness: Ripples of Change 

Heartfulness: Ripples of Change is a volunteer-based, psychosocial counseling program initiated during the second wave in collaboration with NIMHANS. They have a free public helpline where trained counselors provide the first level of counseling to people in distress. 

• The Helpline is available in English and Hindi and starting soon in other regional languages
• More than 5,000 counseling conversations have been conducted so far
• Nearly 4,000 people served
• 350 volunteers trained
• Around 1,400 hours of counseling
• Cases requiring expert interventions are escalated to NIMHANS' expert panel

Helpline Number: 8448 8448 45

For more information, please visit: https://www.rocf.org/