VIJAYAWADA: Andhra Pradesh secured second place behind Kerala in ‘Overall Performance’ among the larger States in the country in the second edition of ‘Healthy States, Progressive India’ rankings released by the NITI Aayog on Tuesday. AP was also listed as the ‘front runner’ in the most improved States.
The second edition of the report focuses on measuring and highlighting the overall performance and incremental improvement of the States over a two-year period (2016-17 and 2017-18).
In ‘Overall Performance’, AP secured 65.13 points, with an increase of 4.97 points from base year (2015-16) to the reference year (2017-18). Earlier in 2015-16, the State stood at eighth place in the overall performance with 60.16 points.
On domain-specific performance, the ranks were issued only in ‘Health Outcomes’ and ‘Key Inputs’ domains and left out ‘Governance and ‘Information domain’.In the category of Key Inputs, AP ranked first with 69.89 points, with an increase of 11.20 points from the base year. Similarly, in the category of Health Outcomes, the State ranked fourth with 66.31 points with an increase of 3.74 points.
Of all 30 health indicators of the State, five are in most improved category, 14 in improved category, one is of no change, four are in deteriorated category, two are in most deteriorated category and four are in not applicable category. In health indicators such as full immunisation coverage, Neonatal Mortality Rate, Under five Mortality Rate, the State showed a decent improvement.
KS Jawahar Reddy, Principal Secretary of Medical Education, Health and Family Welfare department, said, “We are happy with the State’s overall performance. We are yet to improve in seven health indicators, especially in the sex ratio and institutional deliveries. We haven’t identified the cause for the decline of sex ratio and institutional deliveries, but certainly we will take measures to improve the indicators.”
