Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission, one of the largest pan-India schemes for strengthening healthcare infrastructure across the country.
- It is in addition to the National Health Mission.
- It is meant to plug the gaps in the public health infrastructure, especially in terms of critical care facilities and primary care in urban and rural areas.
Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission
- In a bid to increase accessibility, the Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission will provide support to 17,788 rural Health and Wellness Centres in 10 ‘high focus’ states and establish 11,024 urban Health and Wellness Centres across the country.
- It will ensure access to critical care services in all districts of the country with over five lakh population through ‘Exclusive Critical Care Hospital Blocks’.
- The remaining districts will be covered through referral services.
- Integrated public health labs will also be set up in all districts, giving people access to “a full range of diagnostic services” through a network of laboratories across the country.
- Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission also aims to establish an IT-enabled disease surveillance system through a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels.
- All the public health labs will be connected through the Integrated Health Information Portal, which will be expanded to all states and UTs.
Significance of Mission
- India has long been in need of a ubiquitous healthcare system.
- A study (‘State of Democracy in South Asia (SDSA)–Round 3’) by Lokniti-CSDS in 2019 highlighted how access to public health care remained elusive to those living on the margins.
- The study found that 70 per cent of the locations have public healthcare services.
- However, availability was less in rural areas (65 per cent) compared to urban areas (87 per cent).
- In 45 per cent of the surveyed locations, people could access healthcare services by walking, whereas in 43 per cent of the locations they needed to use transport.
- The survey also found that proximity to healthcare services is higher in urban localities than in rural areas.