Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission

Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission

Subject – Governance

Context – Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi on Monday to inaugurate what is being touted as “India’s largest scheme to scale-up health infrastructure”.

Concept –

• The Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission is aimed at ensuring a robust public health infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, capable of responding to public health emergencies or disease outbreak.
• In a bid to increase accessibility, the Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission, an addition to the National Health Mission, will provide support to 17,788 rural Health and Wellness Centres in 10 ‘high focus’ states and establish 11,024 urban Health and Wellness Centres across the country.
• The mission’s objective is to “fill critical gaps in public health infrastructure, especially in critical care facilities and primary care in both the urban and rural areas.”
• It will ensure access to critical care services in all districts of the country with over five lakh population through ‘Exclusive Critical Care Hospital Blocks’. The remaining districts will be covered through referral services.
• Integrated public health labs will also be set up in all districts, giving people access to “a full range of diagnostic services” through a network of laboratories across the country.
• The Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission also aims to establish an IT-enabled disease surveillance system through a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels.
• All the public health labs will be connected through the Integrated Health Information Portal, which will be expanded to all states and UTs.
• In light of the coronavirus pandemic, the mission aims at ensuring a robust system for “detecting, investigating, preventing, and combating public health emergencies and disease outbreaks”.
  • For this, 17 new public health units will be set up, while the 33 existing public health units will be strengthened. It will also train frontline and healthcare workers to respond to public health emergencies effectively.
• Apart from this, the mission will set up other infrastructure, including a national institution for one health, four national institutes for virology, a regional research platform for WHO’s South East Asia region, nine biosafety level-III laboratories, and five regional centres for disease control.

Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM)

• A flagship digital initiative involving the creation of not just a unique health ID for every citizen, but also a digital healthcare professionals and facilities registry.