The Telangana state government led by chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao is keenly focused on enhancing the rural healthcare system in the state. Moving in this direction, the state health department is designing a comprehensive draft to build super specialty hospitals in each district in the state.

Talking at Indo-global Healthcare Summit in Hyderabad, Dr. Rajaiah, deputy chief minister and minister for health, government of Telangana said, “rural health is top priority for our government. We are moving forward with a motto to ensure quality healthcare to everyone in the rural areas. For this, we are drafting a comprehensive plan to strengthen the public health centres at the base level and have a long term plan to establish NIMS (Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences) like super specialty hospital in every district in Telangana.

Initially starting with mother and child care, the health department in Telangana is moving with a long term goals of strengthening the delivery system. For this, the state government is focusing on ensuring 24-hour healthcare services at PHCs, CEmONC centres (FRUs), Janani Suraksha Yojana scheme (JSY), Janani Shishu Suraksha Karyakram (JSSK) across the state. In fact, the MMR and IMR depends crucially on the availability of 24-hour emergency obstetric services, thus all First Referral Units (FRUs) are expected to provide round-the-clock services and are referred to as Basic or Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and New Born Care service (BEmONC or CEmONC) centres.

BEmONC centres provide 24-hour delivery and neonatal services while CEmONC centres offer additional services including Caesarean section or blood transfusions. To maintain standards, it was decided to introduce a process of certification for CEmONC centres to ensure they were properly staffed and equipped and functioning efficiently.

For improving the accessibility and availability of healthcare services on population basis, the state government is already drafting proposals for installing 1 urban primary health centre for every 50,000 population and 1 community health centre for every 2 to 2.5 lakh population and 1 ANM is proposed for 10000 population and one ASHA is proposed for every 1000 to 2000 slum population and one  mahila arogya samiti proposed to 100 to 150 households in the state.

There are about 343 Primary Health Centres (PHCs) in the state working at 24x7 to ensure round the clock healthcare services to the rural people.  As the rainy season has already set in, the state government is also planning to embark on creating awareness on communicable diseases such as malaria, dengue, and chicken guinea etc in the tribal and hilly regions of the state.

“We believe in decentralisation of healthcare delivery in the state. At present we have 10 districts, very soon we are planning to create 14 more districts making the total to 24. Once the state forms new districts we will ensure that each district will have state of the art healthcare delivery mechanism in place”, informed the Minister.

Talking on improving the medical education in the state, the minister also pointed out that the government is working on priority to install the required infrastructure needed for the medical colleges and reiterated the government’s resolve to restore 200 MBBS seats that have been cancelled by  Medical council of India recently.