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Migrant Health Promotion Programme in Shanghai, China

China’s industrial cities attract large numbers of temporary migrant workers, mostly from rural areas. Many lack education and access to public health services. As a largely temporary workforce, most migrant workers to not have any type of social insurance resulting in paying higher healthcare fees.  They are among China’s most vulnerable groups, and in migrant communities infectious diseases and occupational ill health are common.

We are supporting a health education programme - the New Citizen Health Care Project in Shanghai, run by the Xintu Centre of Community Health Protection, which aims to improve the health of migrants and their families by raising awareness about health issues such as HIV/AIDS. We have provided funding of £250,000 over three years to this programme.

Xintu embraces a community oriented approach with multi-sector collaboration to ensure the programme has an impact on policy improvement, community development and, most importantly, knowledge and behaviour change.  The New Citizen Health Care Project, endorsed by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association (CPMA), sponsored by GSK and run by Xintu, focuses on four key areas of healthcare:

• Reproductive Health for 100,000 migrant population
• Prevention of STDs and HIV/AIDS for migrant workers
• Safe motherhood (maternal health) for women and children
• Sexual health & contraception for migrant adolescents

Through establishing New Citizen Life Centres  in the community, the program also assist migrant workers to adapt to city life quicker by encouraging them to become more involved in urban society.   Most of the field worker volunteers for the Centres come from the migrant population itself.  Training is provided, and the work clearly helps volunteers with their own self-development.  “When I first came to the centre, many migrant women were learning how to prevent HIV/AIDS,” says one of the community health field workers, also a migrant woman from Jiangsu. “It was very interesting and brought a lot of help to our daily life.”

The first Life Centre was established in Sanlin Town, Pudong District in Shanghai in 2009.  In its first year, this provided free education on various health related topics for around 20,000 people. Almost 2,500 women took free gynaecological health screening.  And more than 5,000 people attended Life Centre-organised community activities relating to HIV and reproductive knowledge, maternal health, disease prevention, family violence prevention, family and relationship skills and other issues.  Thirty migrant women were also helped to get jobs as site cleaners in Shanghai Expo 2010.

A second new centre was established in November, 2010, in Minhang, Shanghai.