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The Government has approved the launching of a National Rural Health Mission to improve delivery of health care in rural India. The Union Cabinet approved the proposal last evening. The Mission will effect a shift to decentralized management and pool the current vertically operated health programmes under an omnibus Mission. It will utilize opportunities created by panchayats for intersectoral action.
Among the key components of the Mission are creation of a cadre of community health activists trained and accredited for public health services, preparation of village health plans led by panchayats to aggregate into a district plan, provision of untied funds to sub centers for local level health action, improvement of rural public health hospitals to provide round-the-clock effective curative care and working out all these through a district plan for health.
The Mission proposes to provide 2,50,000 community health activists as village level health providers in underserved villages. Over 2000 rural hospitals at the level of Community Health Centres would be upgraded to a uniform set of standards developed as Indian Public Health Standards to benchmark effective levels of service. An allocation of Rs.6510 crore is being made available to the Mission by integration of funds in 2005-06 and these would be substantially augmented through the merging of the Reproductive and Child Health Programme funds with the Mission. The Mission effects a major architectural correction in the delivery of health services in a sector that is expected to receive additional funds in keeping with National Common Minimum Programme commitments.
The National Rural Health Mission would have a Steering Group chaired by the Prime Minister for policy oversight and the Mission would be located in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Ministers of related Ministries; Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission; and public health activists from civil society would be members of the Mission.
The component of training for Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) would be monitored by a team of community health professionals to ensure effectiveness. They are patterned on the lines of barefoot doctors to meet the gap in rural health provisioning at village level. For the first time Indian Public Health Standards akin to ISO standards are being developed to set quality benchmarks for improving public hospitals. The Mission will also promote multiple insurance models, develop viable risk-pooling mechanism and create institutional support for public health management in the country.
Health sector, which depends on inter-sectoral action in areas like sanitation, safe water supply, etc. for effectiveness is expected to gain substantially from decentralized management. The Mission will have sanitation as a major component for which the institutional arrangements of the sanitation programme would be made the same as that of the National Rural Health Mission. The Mission expects to make a substantial reduction in communicable diseases, maternal mortality and infant mortality in the next four years through this changed strategy.
DS/HS/HK/LV
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