Madhya Pradesh CM and Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan Discussed COVID-19 Preparedness

Sh. Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh digitally called upon Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health & Family Welfare to seek his inputs in improving Madhya Pradesh in the field of health and medicine, here today.

Officials of the Madhya Pradesh government digitally presented a roadmap in improving the health sector to make Madhya Pradesh ‘Atmanirbhar’ by the year 2023. Dr. Harsh Vardhan gave his valuable suggestions on them. Sh. Chouhan gave his assurances that all his suggestions would be fully implemented.

At the outset, Dr. Harsh Vardhan congratulated Sh. Chouhan for “managing the COVID-19 scenario in Madhya Pradesh in spite of taking oath during the pandemic” and also for “his personal recovery from the disease.”

Congratulating Madhya Pradesh as one of the few Indian states to have resolved to provide ‘Universal Health Coverage’ to citizens, he noted that “78% of the population are covered under the Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY scheme”. In this context he also said that “despite only 28.26% of the Health and Wellness Centre’s being functional, they witnessed a footfall of 1 crore during the COVID pandemic whereas MP has a total population of 8 crores.” He asked the State authorities to make more HWCs functional as soon as possible. The HWCs along with PM-JAY component of Ayushman Bharat “would reduce out of pocket expenditure on health for citizens by ensuring access to quality healthcare at Health and Wellness Centers.”

Noting that MP has pioneered novel strategies like ‘sick new born care’, ‘first referral unit’, ‘rogi kalyan samiti’, Dr Harsh Vardhan advised them to adopt the eSanjeevani tele-medicine platform which would highly help the authorities manage the health of the population which is highly dispersed.

On the state of health in Madhya Pradesh, he said the State “still has worrying maternal and child health indicators with MMR at 173 per one lakh live births, IMR at 48 per 1000 live births and NMR at 36 per 1000 live birth” which are all higher than the national average. He also pointed out the acute lack of human resources in the Health department. Thereafter, he impressed upon the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh to fill these vacancies and spend at least 8% of the State GDP on Health.

He also concurred with the 8 goals and 33 action points presented by the State Officials and was elated that putting them into practice would make the State self-fulfilled and would be a stepping stone in realizing Prime Minister’s dream of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’.