NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
Theme : Social empowerment, development and management of social sectors/services related to Health and education.
Paper : GS -1,GS -2
TABLE OF CONTENT
- Context
- Public Health and Under Nutrition
- Individualism and Determinants of Individualism
- Public health programmes with individual oriented approach
- Issues
- Road Ahead
Context : A failure to examine and interpret public health problems from a population perspective is leading to ineffective and unsustainable solutions as far as complex public health problems are concerned.
Public Health and Under Nutrition :
Public Health : It is the science of protecting the safety and improving the health of communities through education, policy making and research for disease and injury prevention.
Under Nutrition : It denotes insufficient intake of energy and nutrients to meet an individual’s needs to maintain good health.
Methods used for undernutrition:
- Micronutrient supplementation
- Food fortification
Solutions needed:
- Strengthening of the Public Distribution System
- Supplementary nutrition programmes and Health services
Individualism and Determinants of Individualism :
- It is used to describe holistic, person-based approach to tailoring treatment.
Determinants of individualism:
- Dominance of biomedical knowledge and philosophy in the field of public health with a misconception that what is done at an individual level, when done at a population level, becomes public health.
- Visibility of health impacts among the general public: Health effects are more visible and appear convincing at the individual level
- Improvements at the population level will be clear only after population-level analysis.
- This needs Certain level of expertise and orientation about society: an important skill required for public health practitioners.
- Market’s role and the effect of consumerism in public health practice: The beneficiaries for a programme become the maximum when 100% of the population is targeted.
- Population perspective: the actual beneficiary will reduce to only 5%-10% in case of hospitalization services and 20% of those affected with COVID-19 for treatment needs.
- Make efforts to supply evidence of the actual prevalence of public health problems, instead to cast a wide net and cover 100% of beneficiaries.
Public health programmes with individual oriented approach :
1.Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY)–Ayushman Bharat :
- It is the largest health insurance scheme in the country covering hospitalization expenses for a family for ?5 lakh a year.
- It ensures ‘free’ curative care services for all kinds of hospitalization services.
Issues :
- Need for hospitalization: It does not talk about the need for hospitalization services per year for any population.
- Individualistic response to the problem of hospitalization expenditure faced by populations.
- National Sample Survey Organisation: Only 3% of the total population in India had an episode of hospitalization in a year.
Road Ahead :
- There is a strong tendency in public health to prioritize individual-oriented interventions over societal oriented population-based approaches.
- Population-based health-care planning: The Government needs to ensure health-care facilities to only 3%-5% of the population to cover all the hospitalization needs of a population.
- To effectively manage COVID-19: We needed to have primary, secondary, and tertiary health-care facilities to manage the above proportion of cases.
- The morbidity profile of a population across age groups: It is an important criterion for the curative care needs of a population.
- There is large-scale data that points to this need and can be estimated across populations.
- The need of the population as a single unit needs to be considered.
- All forms of individualistic approaches in public health need to be resisted to safeguard its original principles of practice, viz. population, prevention, and social justice.
MAINS PRACTICE QUESTION : Besides being a moral imperative of the Welfare State, primary health structure is a necessary precondition for sustainable development.” Analyze.(UPSC 2021) (200 words)
FAQs :
1. What is Ayushmaan Bharat ?
Answer-
- It is the largest health insurance scheme in the country covering hospitalization expenses for a family for ?5 lakh a year.
- It ensures ‘free’ curative care services for all kinds of hospitalization services.
2. What is Individualism ?
Answer- It is used to describe holistic, person-based approach to tailoring treatment.