Vishal Phanse and Shailendra Kumar B Hegde
Piramal Swasthya Management and Research Institute, India
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Primary Health Care
Above 67% of population in the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) in India resides in rural interior areas and penetration of health care services in these inaccessible areas remains a problem. With significant short falls in rural healthcare delivery due to the challenges in geographic spread, insufficient human health resources and limited infrastructure, innovative approaches are imperative to tackle these inadequacies for improved rural health care delivery. In partnership with Government of AP, Piramal Swasthya has undertaken a rural health care initiative in public private partnership mode to address the core problems of accessibility, availability and affordability of healthcare in these areas. Primary care is provided to rural beneficiaries in 13700 villages through 292 Mobile Medical Units (MMU). Each MMU visits 2 villages per day across 13 districts on a fixed day basis every month, covering a population of about 24 million. It is a doctor lead model with a basic laboratory set up and scope of services includes identification, screening, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment, follow-up and referral of high-risk cases in the areas of reproductive health, maternal health, neonatal health, child health and adolescent health, communicable and non-communicable diseases. MMUs are equipped with GPS devices, biometric machines, laptop and android tablets for data collection. Beneficiary data is maintained in electronic medical records and tracked on live dashboard. Number of clinics conducted from April 2016 to February 2018 is 270214 and the beneficiaries served for this period were 8061275. Total laboratory test conducted for 2695332 beneficiaries. Antenatal care was provided for 460113 women and 5945108 patients were initiated on treatment. A total number of 1229942 for Diabetes and 162509 for Hypertension cases were detected. MMUs are very effective supplementation to the 3-tier public health system in providing primary healthcare to the underserved population. vishal.phanse@piramalswasthya.org
