Meeting the healthcare needs of rural Meghalaya has been a persistent challenge in Meghalaya. In the last five years however, there have been significant initiatives to ensure that health needs of the rural population are being met through targeted interventions. One reason for high maternal and infant deaths is the poor health and nutrition of the pregnant mother who then gives birth at home to an under-nourished child because institutional delivery was not accessible for pregnant women living in remote, unreached hamlets where there are no roads. The MDA Government has made some noble interventions in the form of the CM-CAREs scheme (Comfort, Assist, Respect, Empowerment). Under this scheme every month a robust network of frontliners track the growth of about 5 lakh children in the age group of 0-5 years in the villages of Meghalaya. Children are being weighed in Anganwadi centres which are now functioning as mini health centres and those that are underweight are being prescribed proper diets and vitamin supplements. PM CAREs was launched in December last year and needs to be carefully monitored so that it delivers what is being envisaged.
Chief Minister Conrad Sangma had stated at the launch of the CM CARE scheme that Anganwadi centres would be transformed into Early Childhood Development Centres with better infrastructure and professionally trained Anganwadi workers. Parents would be made important stakeholders in this programme. Improving the overall human development goals is part of the UN initiated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Additionally, the MOTHER Programme – Meghalaya’s Outcomes-oriented Transformation in Health, Nutrition, Education and Rural Development Programme will ensure that key data on health, nutrition, education and rural development are collected and collated and the same data will be viewed in the chief minister’s dash board in real time. This micro data will be used to make policy interventions. The MOTHER App uses real time data on pregnant women to monitor their health status on a continuous basis. This should help reduce maternal and infant mortality the twin concerns in Meghalaya.
Now that 31 CHCs are being upgraded into first referral units to tackle emergency surgeries and other health concerns, access to healthcare would further improve and there would be less dependence on private healthcare providers. The Government would be doing great service if it is able to ensure that resident doctors are in place in each of these CHCs. For decades, doctors commute from Shillong to the CHCs and do so only on market days. Hopefully that era of non-resident doctors will now be over when the 30 doctors currently trained in Chennai to handle UltraSonography, life-saving skills, emergency observatory care, Caesarean delivery (C-section) among others return to take on their responsibilities. The first referral units would ensure that pregnant mothers do not have to travel more than 45 minutes to 1 hour for delivery. This would democratise healthcare delivery, apart from making it affordable.