The facility in regional languages will help validate and verify records of beneficiaries and health workers who have no facility of Internet
Prathiba Raju – New Delhi
The Mother and Child Tracking Facilitation Centre in South Delhi will soon start an inbound calling facility, which will help validate and verify records of beneficiaries and health workers who have no facility of Internet. The centre keeps a tab on the ASHAs and ANMs to generates a ground level data for a better maternity phase of a women in rural areas and the child’s health post delivery.
The inbound and outbound calling will be in Hindi and English, while the regional languages covered would be Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali, Odiya and Assamese. One can give a missed call to the toll-free number 10588 and the person will be called back within 90 seconds.
A team of 86 help desk agents, mostly women, connect to rural expectant mothers in remote locations of 13 states and help them have safe pregnancy. The name-based tracking of expectant mothers is done by the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) which is an initiative by the The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) at the National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW) to improve the maternal and child healthcare services.
Institute of Health and MCTS has benefited 37,16,166 pregnant women and parents of newborns. By December 2016, 2,14,789 Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs) and 5,97,003 Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) have been contacted for data validation.
Explaining the objective of the facilitation centre, Alok Kumar Verma, Director Statistics, MoHFW, said, “We generate authentic data from the grass root level which is compiled and used to identify how the ministry’s PHC and sub centre operate effectively. The tracking helps to see whether the ASHAs and ANMs are working up to the mark and the beneficiaries like the expectant mothers, infants are benefited by the government schemes. It helps the policy makers and implementers to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the programme.”