SHILLONG, Nov 4: The Meghalaya government has initiated an ambitious project to strengthen the health care system in the state’s rural areas and tied up with the World Bank.
The “Meghalaya Health Systems Strengthening Project” entails 50 million dollars. The World Bank will provide with 40 million dollars while the state’s share will be 10 million dollars.
Joint Secretary of the Health department, Ram Kumar S said the idea is to strengthen the health care system within five years. The programme has already come into force and it will continue till 2026, he said.
Recently, the Government of India, the Government of Meghalaya and the World Bank had signed the project. It is expected to improve the quality of health services and strengthen the state’s capacity to handle future health emergencies, including COVID-19.
The project is also supposed to enhance the management and governance capabilities and health facilities, expand the design and coverage of health insurance programme, improve the quality of health services through certification and better human resource systems and enable efficient access to medicines and diagnostics.
Further, it will help strengthen the effectiveness of the state’s health insurance programme, known as the Megha Health Insurance Scheme (MHIS), which currently covers 56% of the households.
With its merger with the national Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, MHIS now plans to offer a more comprehensive package and cover 100% of the households. This will reduce barriers to accessing hospital services and preventing catastrophic out-of-pocket costs for poor families.
Kumar said Meghalaya has an adequate number of CHCs and PHCs as per the national standard but the problem is about sub-centres. As per national standards, the state should have around 700 of them but it has only around 450.
The proposal for strengthening the sub-centres comes from the district selection committee. The work has started for 113 such projects and it is expected to end by March next year.
However, major works like the construction of the District Medical and Health Office in Ri Bhoi will take around two years for completion, Kumar said.
Some 100 of the sub-centres already have solar power with energy efficient equipment. The government has plans to convert all the sub-centres into wellness centres by 2025 with 12-20 services, including screening for disease.
The government also plans to develop an IT ecosystem of digital health where the patients’ history of cases will be stored in a system
and they will not be required to carry their health-related files, Kumar said.
Admitting that there are different levels of manpower problems, he said the government is coming up with different courses to ensure the state has enough specialists in the next seven-eight years.