UP, Bihar and Bengal fall on health index -GS Mudur

-The Telegraph

The findings suggest that health parameters in poorest-performing states have deteriorated over the two-year period

Measures of human health have fallen in eight states, including Bengal, with the steepest incremental drops over a two-year period in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, according to a health index released on Tuesday by Niti Aayog, the government’s think tank.

 

The index — a tool to assess states’ performance on 23 measures of health care — has found that the scores of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand fell by five or more points during 2017-18 compared to 2015-16.

The findings suggest that health parameters in states with the poorest performance on health have deteriorated over the two-year period.

Their lower scores have been attributed to multiple parameters, including low birth rates, quality of public health facilities, rapid transfers of state and district level health personnel, and drops in tuberculosis treatment success rates, among others.

Even Kerala, the nation’s best performing state on health parameters, showed a 2.55 point score decline while Bengal’s score fell by 1.08. The most significant improvements have occurred in Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Assam and Andhra Pradesh.

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