Ateneo School of Medicine: Ginlaw Goaw

Water is essential to any living things here on earth especially to humans. It serves a lot of functions in daily living. It can be used to clean things, to generate energy, and a lot more things, but most especially, to quench thirst and to nourish the body. Pollution has great impact on the drinking water. As pollution, may it be water, air or land, increases, the amount of drinking water is decreasing.  The potability of water now is always taken in to account when it is used for human consumption. Water can be a vessel for a lot of diseases like diarrhea, typhoid fever and cholera if not properly handled and consumed by humans. It is important to determine the safety of water when it comes for human consumption.

The general objective of the health plan on water is to increase the number of households having access to safe drinking water from 30% to 90% in Barangay Goaw by the year. One of the specific objectives is to increase the knowledge of the community about water handling practices in the household level.

Several interventions were already done. This exposure, house-to-house survey evaluated the practices of each family with regards to water handling. 

“Agianan sa Tubig na Limpyo” is a community assembly where representative of each households were taught about possible ways of water contamination and methods of its prevention. The assembly was done last April 2015, and now, undergoing its monitoring and evaluation.

The assembly was done last April 2015, and as of now, the number of households practicing proper water handling is still increasing. Having knowledge about water contamination and its prevention may be the cause of the households to seek on ways on how to effectively practice proper water handling. Yet, there is still room for improvement. Therefore, another community assembly will be planned. This time, instead of doing it barangay level, purok level will be done in order to increase the number of people attending the assembly, thus, more households will be knowledgeable about proper water handling practices.

An increase in the number of households practicing proper water handling is noted. Yet there is still room for improvement, and therefore a future plan of doing the assembly again at the purok level.