Lucknow, April 27 (IANS) With the Uttar Pradesh government declaring 2015-16 as the Year of Mother and Child, a campaign to ensure maternal and child health would be launched by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday, an official said.
The government was driven by a strong commitment to ensure a significant decline in maternal and infant mortality rate, improve the status of nutrition and health indicators and ensure full and complete immunization of all children, Principle Secretary, Health, Arvind Kumar said at a press conference here on Monday.
A mobile health service, “Mobile Kunji”, would also be launched by the chief minister in addition to a website, “Hausla Saajhedaari”, meant for accreditation of private hospitals for family planning.
“The present ‘Hausla’ campaign is not only continuing to flag the issues and concerns raised last year but is deepening of the efforts and commitments made. Uttar Pradesh is one of the biggest, most populated and diverse state of the country, hence every breakthrough made here impacts the national indicators in a decisive way,” he said.
Listing several initiatives the state government since the beginning of the campaign last year, Kumar went on to identify the formation of Nutrition Mission as one major step taken to improve the status of maternal and child health in the state.
The present Hausla campaign to be rolled out across the state, was preceded by a three months preparation to ensure training on scale, strengthen the health infrastructure including supply chain. This pre-campaign phase began on February 1.
Kumar said that this year-long campaign would give utmost priority to convergence of services and hence the Village Health and Nutrition Day (VHND)/Urban Health and Nutrition Day (UHND) would be scaled up and enabled to serve as a platform to converge at one place and time all the primary services.
This, he pointed out, would include registration of pregnant women, ANCs, immunization, nutrition supplement distribution, information related to adolescent health and distribution of IFA tablets and family planning counseling.