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Telangana logs a ‘healthy’ trend

Registers rapid improvement in healtcare indicators in the last six years

By M. Sai Gopal

Updated On - 7 July 2021, 12:42 AM

Telangana logs a ‘healthy’ trend — File photo of a new born baby and a mother

Hyderabad: The key health indicators that reflect the functioning and performance of the local healthcare systems, have continued to register remarkable improvement in Telangana. In the last six years, between 2014 and 2020, Telangana recorded significant improvement in all major healthcare indicators including maternal mortality rate, infant mortality rate, under-five mortality rate, neonatal mortality rate, institutional deliveries, healthcare infrastructure in teaching hospitals and women and child health.

Sustained focus on investment, ways to improve performance of local healthcare systems, recruitment of manpower, and development of infrastructure have played a big role in the overall improvement of major healthcare indicators, officials said. A case in point is the investment made by the State government in developing Mother and Child Health (MCH) centres and Neonatal ICU units established across the State to save the lives of high-risk mothers and infants.

Back in 2014-15, the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in Telangana was 92 deaths for one lakh live births and by 2020-21, based on the statistics provided by the State Health Department, the MMR is down to 63 for one lakh births. Another quantifiable development has been institutional deliveries, especially the rise in deliveries at government hospitals across Telangana. Since the launch of KCR Kits in June 2017, the deliveries in government hospitals, which used to be below 30 per cent of the overall number of deliveries that take place annually, have improved to 50 per cent while the overall institutional deliveries have reached 97 per cent from 90 per cent.

Thanks to a special focus on saving the lives of the newborns by establishing NICUs across the State, in the last six years, the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) for 1,000 live births is down from 39 in 2014-15 to 26.4 in 2020-21 while the under-five mortality rate too has dropped from 41 to 29.4 for every 1,000 live births.

In the last two years, the Covid pandemic has also triggered substantial investment in infrastructure in teaching hospitals and free diagnostic services. Massive work is underway to have at least 5,000 government hospitals beds with dedicated oxygen lines before the third wave of Covid breaks out. The pandemic also led to investment in creating critical care facilities like ICUs in government hospitals across all district hospitals.