President Pranab Mukherjee conferred Sunita Sharma, a health worker with the School of Public Health, with the National Florence Nightingale Award 2014 on Monday at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Sunita is a multipurpose health worker in an urban resettlement colony in the Urban Health and Training Centre under the Department of Community Medicine, School of Public Health, PGIMER, Chandigarh. She has been working here for the past 18 years.
While working with the colony, Sunita developed a close bond with the community members, consisting of migrants from various states, who belong to the lower socio-economic class.
The prompt medical help she provided the community members with helped them build their trust in her.
Though given a specific survey area in this colony, Sunita surveyed other areas and provided medical care to the needy. Sunita has played a major role in sensitising community members of procedures such as vasectomy, tubectomy etc. and helped the community in the registration of birth and death. She has also played a pivotal part in motivating people towards drug de-addiction and polio immunisation.