About of the Health

Improvement in the health and nutritional status of the population has been one of the major thrust areas for the social development programmes of the country. This was to be achieved through improving the access to and utilization of Health, Family Welfare and Nutrition services with special focus on under  served and under  pr ivi leged segments of the population. Over the last five decades, India has built up a vast health infrastructure and manpower at primary, secondary and tertiary care in government, voluntary and private sectors. These institutions are manned by professionals and paraprofessionals trained in the medical colleges in modern medicine and ISM&H and paraprofessional training institutions. The population has become aware of the benefits of health related technologies for prevention, early diagnosis and effective treatment for a wide variety of illnesses and accessed available services. Technological advances and improvement in access to health care technologies, which were relatively inexpensive and easy to implement, had resulted in substantial improvement in health indices of the population and a steep decline in mortality. The extent of access to and utilization of health care varied substantially between states, districts and different segments of society; this to a large extent, is responsible for substantial differences between states in health indices of the population.

During the 1990s, the mortality rates reached a plateau and the country entered an era  of dual  disease burden. Communicable diseases have become more difficult to combat because of development of insecticide resistant strains of vectors, antibiotics resistant strains of bacteria and emergence of HIV infection for which there is no therapy. Longevity and changing life style have resulted in the increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Under nutrition, micro nutrient deficiencies and associated health problems coexist with obesity and non-communicable diseases. The existing health system suffers from inequitable distribution of institutions and manpower. Even though the country produces every year  over  17,000 doctors  in modern system of medicine and similar number of ISM&H practitioners and paraprofessionals, there are huge gaps  incritical manpower in institutions pro viding primary health care , especially in the remote rural and tribal areas where health care needs are the greatest. Some of the factors responsible for the poor functional status of the system are:

·         mismatch between personnel and infrastructure;

·         lack of Continuing Medical Education (CME) programmes for orientation and  skillupgradation of the personnel;

·         lack of appropriate functional referral system;

·         absence of well established linkages between different components of the system.