Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, Aug 1: While the Prime Minister’s Nutrition Council has been working vigorously on a multi-sectoral plan to improve overall nutritional status of women and children, under a unique initiative, probably the first of its kind in the world, the community health workers in India are promoting birth spacing through awareness and door to door distribution of contraceptives.
This was disclosed by Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad at the Global Health Policy Forum Summit held at London today. He congratulated the Government of United Kingdom for the privilege of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games at London-2012. At the time when providing equitable, affordable and accessible health is the concern of global community, these are worthwhile initiatives on the part of UK Government, Mr Azad maintained.
“It saddens me that every year more than 2,80,000 women around the globe die during child birth despite the fact that most of these deaths are preventable with simple and cost effective interventions. For India, the challenge is particularly formidable considering that we have the largest number of 27 million and an annual birth cohort of 26 million babies”, Mr Azad added.
The Union Health Minister further said that PM’s Nutrition Council is working vigorously on a multi- sectoral plan to improve over all nutritional status of women and children. “Our efforts to control anemia now encompass adolescent boys and girls in addition to children and pregnant women. A nation-wide programme for weekly supplementation of iron and folic acid has already been initiated to cover 130 million adolescents. Another new initiative is a name, address and telephone based mother and child tracking system to ensure and monitor timely delivery of full complement of services to pregnant women and children. Till now, 43 million pregnant women and children are already registered in the web enabled system and are being closely monitored”, Mr Azad said.
Mr Azad suggested that the developing countries could lay emphasis on strengthening of infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, provision of adequate skilled human resource, education and nutrition of children and adolescents, ensuring full complement of services by tracking and monitoring beneficiaries, bridging the gap between communities and health facilities through trained health community workers, health promotion and awareness and accessibility of high quality drugs and vaccines.
Referring to National Rural Health Mission, Mr Azad said under the scheme massive benefit has been accorded to the people from remote and rural areas in the country. The special focus has been on the areas with the highest maternal mortality. As a result several States have witnessed an average decline of 67 points in MMR against the national decline of 42 points. The NRHM has led to creation of large scale physical infrastructure, major augmentation of human resources, assured drug supplies, mobile medication units for cities and rural areas, engagement of 8.60 lakh community health workers, ante-natal check ups, health promotion messages, provision of free transport and drugs and testing kits. Azad said India has had major success in promoting institutional births with the launch of an innovative scheme of providing cash incentives to pregnant women delivering in -health facilities. Nearly 11 million women were benefited under the scheme last year, he maintained.
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