Telangana sets ‘healthy’ trend

State ranked third in country by Niti Aayog for improving IMR, NMR

Hyderabad: Telangana has continued to improve its key health indicators including infant mortality rates, neonatal mortality rate and institutional deliveries in government hospitals, according to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 (2019-20) of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which was released on Saturday.

Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, there has been a significant change in all the key health indicators reflecting the improving quality of healthcare services and well-being of the population in the State. The survey was carried out between June 2019 and November 2019 covering 27,351 households and 31,381 individuals across Telangana.

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As a result of sustained efforts by the State’s Health Department to improve public healthcare services, Telangana, according to Niti Aayog, is now ranked third in the country, after Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for overall quality of healthcare delivery.

In 2014-15, the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), defined as the number infants who have died for 1,000 live births, was 39 while the latest NFHS-5 survey has indicated this dropping to 26.4 in the State. Similarly, Under-5 Mortality Rate (U5MR), number of children under five years who died for 1,000 live births, which was 41 in in 2014-15 has dropped to 29.4 in the latest survey. The Neonatal Mortality Rate (NMR), defined as the mortality of infants within the first 28 days for 1000 live births, also came down to 16.8 from 25 in 2014-15.

Thanks largely to the ongoing direct cash benefit scheme and KCR Kits initiative of the State government, Institutional deliveries also continued to improve. The NFHS-4 of 2015-16 indicated the institutional deliveries to be 91 per cent, which has now improved to 97 per cent in the State. The percentage of deliveries in government hospitals too shot up from 30 per cent in 2015-16 to 49.7 per cent.

However, efforts by the State government to reduce caesarean sections (C-Sections) in private and public maternity hospitals appear to have not yielded the desired results. The latest survey indicated that the overall percentage of C–sections in public and private health care institutions was 60.7 while in 2015-16, the overall percentage of C–sections was 57.7 percent.

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