STATE HEALTH INDEX

• NITI Aayog has released the fourth edition of the State Health Index for 2019–20.
• The report, titled “Healthy States, Progressive India”, ranks states and Union Territories on their year-on-year incremental performance in health outcomes as well as their overall status.
• Earlier, the Global Health Security (GHS) Index 2021, developed in partnership by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center was released. India, with a score of 42.8 (out of 100) has slipped by 0.8 points since 2019.

Important points:

• The State Health Index is an annual tool to assess the performance of states and UTs, which has been compiled and published since 2017.
• It is a weighted composite index based on 24 indicators grouped under the domains of ‘Health Outcomes’, ‘Governance and Information’, and ‘Key Inputs/Processes’.
• It includes parameters such as neonatal mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate, sex ratio at birth.
• It includes parameters such as institutional deliveries, average occupancy of senior officers in key posts earmarked for health.
• It consists of proportion of shortfall in health care providers to what is recommended, functional medical facilities, birth and death registration and tuberculosis treatment success rate.
• NITI Aayog, with technical assistance from the World Bank and in close consultation with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).

Focus:

• Round IV of the report focuses on measuring and highlighting the overall performance and incremental improvement of states and UTs over the period 2018–19 to 2019–20.
• To ensure comparison among similar entities, the ranking is categorized as:
• In terms of annual incremental performance, Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Telangana are the top three ranking states.
• Mizoram and Meghalaya registered the maximum annual incremental progress.
• Delhi, followed by Jammu and Kashmir, showed the best incremental performance.
• The top-ranking states were Kerala and Tamil Nadu among the ‘Larger States’, Mizoram and Tripura among the ‘Smaller States’, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu (DH&DD) and Chandigarh among the UTs.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT