The 66th session of the World Health Assembly began in Geneva, Switzerland today. The World Health Assembly is the supreme decision-making body of WHO. The main functions of the Assembly are to determine the policies of the Organization, appoint the Director-General, supervise financial policies and, review and approve the proposed programme budget.
Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Minister of Health & Family Welfare attended the Session.
Addressing the Plenary Session, Shri Azad said the World Health Assembly provided an opportunity to share with the world community in achieving the shared goals of the global public health agenda. It also gave a platform to reiterate and reaffirm our commitment to those goals. He said there had been remarkable reductions in MMR, IMR and TFR in India following the massive and strategic investments by the government under the National Rural Health Mission. Under the innovative Safe Motherhood Scheme of providing cash assistance to pregnant women delivering in public health facilities, the number of beneficiaries has risen from 7 hundred thousand in 2005-06 to 11 million annually since the past 3 years. Building on the phenomenal progress of the scheme, India added another major nation-wide intervention in 2011 to eliminate out-of-pocket expenses for both pregnant women and sick neonates. Under this scheme, every pregnant woman is entitled to free delivery including caesarean section, in public health institutions. Besides free ante-natal and post-natal check-ups, this scheme provides for free diagnostics, free medicines, free consumables, free food, free caesarean section, free blood, and free transport to health facility and drop back home. Similar entitlements are also available to sick newborns up to 30 days after birth. In February, 2013 India launched another massive National Child Health Programme to screen and manage children in the age group of 0 to 18 years for various health conditions such as defects at birth, deficiencies, diseases and developmental delays including disabilities. The programme proposes to cover more than 270 million children in a phased manner.
He said India placed comprehensive health systems strengthening at the centre of its Universal Health Coverage effort with action on free access to essential medicines. This approach is showing a positive impact on reduction in out-of-pocket spending and better financial protection. Since 2000, the burden of Non-Communicable Diseases has increased rapidly. It causes two-thirds of all deaths now. Realizing the gravity of the situation, India has up-scaled and expanded National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke with substantial hikes in fund allocations to counter the threat of NCDs.
Shri Azad said India constituted an expert group to develop a framework for providing accessible and affordable healthcare to all by bridging the identified gaps to meet the projected decadal health needs of the people. The expert group developed specific recommendations in six critical areas to augment the capacity of India’s health system to fulfill its vision of Universal Health Coverage. In the face of the huge health challenges, we are heartened by our success in the eradication of polio. It has been 28 months now that India has not reported a single polio case. This has been made possible through strong political will and continuous leadership of the programme at the highest levels of Government translating into adequate financial resources, improved coverage, quick response times, adoption of technological innovations and unprecedented community participation. “We believe that for effective global action on the social and economic determinants of health, we must prioritize and ensure adequate funding support to the countries with huge disease burden and poverty. Towards this noble cause, India has shown a small commitment this year by making an additional voluntary contribution of an amount of fifty-thousand US dollars to the WHO, without linking it to any specific programme of work” he added.
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