NATIONAL HEALTH MISSION

Recently, the Prime Minister launched the Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission.

Important points:

• It is one of the largest pan-India schemes for strengthening healthcare infrastructure across the country.
• It is in addition to the National Health Mission
• It will provide support to 17,788 rural Health and Wellness Centres in 10 ‘high focus’ states and establish 11,024 urban Health and Wellness Centres across the country.
• Through this, critical care services will be available in all the districts of the country with more than five lakh population through exclusive critical care hospital blocks, while the remaining districts will be covered through referral services.
• Under the scheme, a national institution for one health, four new national institutes for virology, a regional research platform for WHO (World Health Organization) South East Asia Region, nine biosafety level-III laboratories, and five new regional national centres for disease control will be set up.

Objectives:

1. To ensure a robust public health infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, capable of responding to public health emergencies or disease outbreaks.
2. To establish an IT-enabled disease surveillance system through a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels.

Significance:

• India has long been in need of an extensive healthcare system. A study (‘State of Democracy in South Asia (SDSA)–Round 3’) by Lokniti-CSDS in 2019 highlighted how access to public health care remained elusive to those living on the margins.
• The study found that 70% of the locations have public healthcare services. However, availability was less in rural areas (65%) compared to urban areas (87%).

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT