Govt aims to reduce infant-maternal mortality rate
SHILLONG: MOTHER App being developed by Meghalaya, will help to reduce infant and maternal mortality rate and facilitate overall improvement of women.
During the Independence Day celebrations in the city on Thursday, Chief Minister Conrad Sangma announced that he is naming the initiative as Meghalaya’s Outcomes oriented Transformation in Health, nutrition, Education and Rural development Programme or the MOTHER programme.
“This name signifies the centrality of mothers in achieving development goals in health, nutrition and education. The MOTHER programme is my government’s tribute to all the women (mei’s and magipa’s) of the state.
He said once the programme is launched across the state, all grass root development functionaries will have the MOTHER app on their phones. They will collect key data on health, nutrition, education and rural development and the same data will be seen in the chief minister’s dash board in real time. This micro data will be used to make policies and drive transformational development.
He said in health sector, the state’s performance on key maternal and child health indicators like infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate is not satisfactory.
“ Our infant mortality rate is 39 deaths per 1000 live births and our maternal mortality rate is 197 deaths per 100,000 live births. My goal is to reduce these numbers dramatically in the next 2-3 years. To achieve this, we have successfully piloted the new initiative, MOTHER App that uses real time data on the pregnant women to monitor their health status on a continuous basis”, he said.
Under this data driven model, primary data on pregnant women is collected by the medical officers and health functionaries through a mobile app. This data is updated regularly and can be seen in Shillong by the chief minister and other health officials. Each pregnant woman can be tracked and on any given day, the number of women due for delivery can be seen on the chief minister’s dash board.
In South West Garo Hills district, where the initiative was piloted, institutional deliveries improved by 30 percent in just 3 months.
“Now we are expanding this project to all the districts of the state and to cover not only health and institutional deliveries, but also the sectors of nutrition, education and rural development”, he said.