NEW DELHI, Dec 30:
The tragic suicide of the parents of a seven-year-old boy who died of dengue after five top hospitals denied him admission had the nation recoil in horror but despite outrage from media and citizenry it only highlighted the symptomic incapability of India’s hospital system to deal with outbreak of diseases, even frequently recurring ones like dengue.
The year 2015 also saw the Ministry for Health and Family Welfare swing into action by ordering hospitals not to deny treatment facilities to patients suffering from fever worried that they might have contracted dengue.
This year too saw its share of controversies after BJP Chief of Parliamentary Committee claimed that there were no Indian studies linking cigarettes with cancer. This resulted in the country missing the April 1 deadline for a major initiative to dissuade smoking by stamping health warnings across 85 per cent of the surface of cigarette packs.
The plans were announced by Health Minister J P Nadda in Parliament but did not materialise. For health activists, this was a major disappointment that the Modi government was not living up to its promises.
Mr Nadda, who took over from Harsh Vardhan, gave preference to Mission Indradhanush to increase immunisation coverage utilising lessons learnt from the successful Pulse Polio programme. Though National Health Assurance Mission, among the first announcements of the new government, was still in the planning stage, as too the free drugs and diagnostics schemes promised.
India, it was being recognised, had achieved considerable progress in reducing infant and under-five mortality rates but was lagging in achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. According to the National Health Profile 2015, the Under Five Mortality Rate (U5MR) dipped from an estimated 125 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 52 in 2012. As far as the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is concerned, it reduced by nearly 50 per cent during 1990-2012 and at present the level stood at 42.
However, the situation in the health sector remained the same: be it the national capital or the hinterland, hospitals in the country constantly grappled with a dire shortage of emergency drugs and items like surgical gloves, blades and sutures, apart from beds, doctors and nurses.
That India’s health care delivery mechanism has still a long way to go is widely acknowledged. The doctor-patient ratio is skewed and more than 75 per cent of India’s population has no health insurance, there is a shortage of two million hospital beds compared with the global requirement of 2.5 beds per 1000 people and the Government’s spending on health is woefully inadequate.
A white paper Aarogya Bharat 2015, released by NATHEALTH, Healthcare Federation of India shows India requires 3 trillion US Dollars in cumulative funding and has the potential to generate 15 to 20 million jobs by 2025.
This has to be seen in context that India aspires to emerge as a medical and wellness hub in the world!
In a bid to protect the children from more vaccine preventable diseases, the Government proposes to introduce new vaccines as part of India’s Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) in a phased manner over a period of time.
These include an adult vaccine against Japanese Encephalitis (JE) in the high burden districts, Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV), Rotavirus vaccine and Measles Rubella vaccine.
While India is polio free but to maintain this status, the Inactivated Polio Vaccine was introduced on October 30, 2015 initially in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Assam and Punjab benefitting 2.7 crore children every year.
For the Adult JE vaccine, 21 high burden districts have been identified in Assam, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal while Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea among infants and young children in the world.
In August, the minister launched in Shimla a national innovation portal to boost innovations in public healthcare. It will serve as a platform in the public domain to facilitate collection and dissemination of good practices and innovations That are found to be replicable.
On June 21, the observance of International Yoga Day, a major initiative towards prevention of lifestyle diseases like blood pressure and diabetics, was described by Mr Nadda as shifting the focus from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases.
This year he also urged policy makers to find out of the box solutions to eradicate malnutrition to change the trajectory of Indian children’s future saying the battle against under nutrition ‘’must now be fought at ground level in communities and at homes’’.
Among the downs was a recent WHO report ranking India as having the highest number of tuberculosis (TB) cases in the world. In 2014, 2.2 million cases were estimated in India which is higher than any other country,” the minister said. This was mainly because of the large population even though the incidence, prevalence and mortality due to TB in India has been consistently declining over the past 15 years, he said.
The country ranked 17th in incidence rate among the 22 high-burden countries in the world. Ringing out the passing year, the minister launched four IT-based health care initiatives including an audio-based mobile service which will deliver weekly messages to families about pregnancy and child birth, an IT-enabled tool to help quit tobacco, and a dedicated helpline for TB patients.
Also launched was a Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS), a web-enabled name-based system to monitor and ensure delivery of full spectrum of services to all pregnant women and children, who would receive weekly voice messages relevant to the stage of pregnancy or age of the infant. The free of cost service in the first phase of implementation, such messages would be sent to the pregnant women and infants’ mothers in Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. (UNI)
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