Areas Of Intervention:
To begin with we would endeavor to break away from a narrow interpretation of the clinical health care package to include a spectrum of needs relevant to conditions of endemic poverty, economic insecurity and poor living conditions which essentially perpetuate the link between poverty and ill health.

I. Our immediate concern and the first point of intervention is the cost of treatment which for any major disease can be broken up into direct and indirect costs.
i) The direct or the treatment cost includes the cost of investigations, drugs, and surgical procedures.
ii) The indirect cost i.e. the non-treatment costs include the cost of transport, loss of wages and expenses in terms of food brought from an eatery.  The indirect costs have on an average to be calculated for two persons because a patient is generally accompanied by another person and in case of a child, two persons

Despite all the support that a public sector set up like Safdarjung Hospital provides, it is not only the components of essential clinical package outside the margins of state subsidy that are  prohibitive, but also the indirect costs that mount up and sound the deathknell for patients who are not able to bear them.  Indirect costs in fact act as an important determinant in medical care seeking behaviour reflected in the mounting number of patients who leave against medical advice.  Sapna aims to support and supplement the efforts of the hospital by providing free medicines, diagnostic tests, surgical consumables including blood and costs of post-operative care to the impoverished in all such cases where full subsidy is not available.  In addition, keeping in view the low economic and nutritional status of a majority of the patients taking refuge at the Dharamashala, Sapna aims to take care of the entire spectrum of their nutritional needs.

II.Given the large patient inflow, the second critical area of intervention is providing informational support to patients who do not know how to access the available services.  The support needs to begin right from the point of registration to the point of interface with the consultant at the required speciality/super speciality and in helping patients access the right laboratories, diagnostic centres, etc.  In consultation with the hospital administration SAPNA would endeavour to identify gaps in support and provide whatever is needed to bridge the gap.

III.The third major area is provisioning for nursing needs in the dharmashala for post operative cases who have had to extend their stay after being discharged for follow ups, etc.  The recreational/devotional needs of the patients would be also addressed.

IV.Promoting the rehabilitation of disabled people to the maximum extent possible is also part of our immediate goals.

Our long term plans include setting up of crèches for children with strong non-formal educational inputs.  For children receiving long term treatments at the paediatric wards or, recuperating at the Dharmashala we are in the process of developing innovative educational and recreational modules.  Alleviating the pain of terminally ill patients through counselling, linking up with Pain clinics and  Hospices, would be our priority.  As part of our drive to promote community based initiatives in the area of health we aspire to identify and link up with a core team of young doctors, interns and medical students in order to promote the maximal use of primary health care facility in community based health care programs.
In order to attain all the objectives identified above and in order to interface more openly and proactively with Hospital Administration SAPNA requires a small office space within the hospital premises.