Telangana Health Minister Eatala Rajender calls for disease mapping, referral system

HYDERABAD: Telangana Health Minister Eatala Rajender held a meeting on Monday with senior officials of the Health Department on strengthening the primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare facilities in the State. 

The Minister directed the officials to take up disease mapping to find out why diseases such as malaria, measles, and fluorosis are prevalent and focus efforts on making required infrastructure and medicines available to treat such diseases. 

He also pointed out the need for developing a new software for keeping track of various details of medicines at healthcare facilities, including their expiry date, to improve accountability, and ensure that restricted usage medicines are not stored. 

The Minister also asked the department to develop a system that would enable monitoring of primary healthcare centres (PHC) from the Command Control Centre in Hyderabad.

He directed that a comprehensive action plan be drawn up on good health care systems and what were the obstacles encountered in their implementation and how to overcome them. Eatala said that the network of government hospitals was much wider than private hospitals and hence the Health Department must develop the referral system in government hospitals as well and utilise the services of Asha workers for this. 

The Minister also pointed out the need for having a proper reception in each government healthcare facility that could guide the patients properly.  

He said that due to the KCR Kits scheme, 50 per cent deliveries were taking place in government hospitals, and Kalyana Lakshmi scheme had helped reduce the number of early marriages, early pregnancies, and premature births.