NEW DELHI: A health index report by the government's top think-tank Niti Aayog has ranked Kerala, followed by Tamil Nadu and Telangana as the best performing states and Uttar Pradesh as the worst state for the year 2019-20.
The parameters used for rankings include 24 crucial indicators, grouped under health outcomes, governance and information and key processes.
These indicators comprise important parameters such as neonatal mortality rate, under-five mortality rate, sex ratio at birth, maternal mortality rate, and immunisation coverage, administrative parameters like average occupancy in key posts and data integrity measures, among others.
It also included parameters like human resources at primary and sub-divisional health centers including doctors, specialists and nurses, apart from a number of functional health and wellness centers.
In the fourth version of the report, three new indicators were added which included maternal mortality ratio, proportion of pregnant women who received 4 or more antenatal care checkups and level of registration of deaths.
The report was divided in three parts - larger states, smaller states and Union Territories. Among the smaller states, Mizoram was the best performer and Nagaland was at the bottom.
Among the union territories, on the other hand, Chandigarh was on top, followed by Dadra and Nagar Haveli while Delhi was ranked three. Puducherry was the worst overall performer in the category.
The report said that while Uttar Pradesh with the lowest overall performance, ranked at the bottom, it ranked at the top in terms of incremental performance by registering the highest incremental change from the base year 2018-19.
Importantly, Telangana performed well both in terms of overall performance as well as incremental performance and secured the third position in both instances.
The latest report noted that it attained universal full immunization of children and total case notification of tuberculosis, had fully functional first referral units and all primary health centres and urban PHCs functional as Health and Wellness Centres.
The state also had operation theatres and labour rooms of all district hospitals certified under LaQshya and Kayakalp with scores of over 70 %, no vacancies of ANMs in sub centres and medical officers in PHCs.
In terms of incremental performance, Telangana made major gains in the key inputs and processes domain with nearly half the indicators in the fully achieved or most improved or improved category.