HYDERABAD: A recent Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) report highlights the sorry state of Primary Health Centres (PHC) in Telangana, in addition to the poor maintenance of their employee records by the Health Department.
As a consequence, the State government has lost the opportunity to bag extra funding from the Central government through the Result Based Funding (RBF) mechanism — wherein 20 per cent of the National Health Mission funds from the Centre to the State governments are dependent on the latter’s performance in seven major parameters.
The MoHFW had recently released the ‘Health system Strengthening - Conditionality Report of the States 2018-19’. According to this, Telangana scored only 5 out of 14 points.
The low score can primarily be attributed to the State having less than 30 per cent PHCs that are rated three stars by the Central government, apart from the poor maintenance of records of permanent and temporary employees on the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), like salary invoice, transfer orders and line listing of staff.
Telangana was allotted Rs 81 crore under this performance-based funding scheme.
However, owing to performing well in five out of the seven parameters, the State could secure an extra amount of Rs 21 crore, taking its allowance to Rs 102 crore. If the State could achieve more points, it could have received more — nearly double the amount.
The five parameters are — Niti Aayog rankings, operationalisation of health and wellness centres, grading of district hospitals, districts covered under mental health programme, and screening of 30-plus population under non-communicable diseases.
As part of the RBF, the states are judged on the seven parameters and assigned scores between -14 to +14. Accordingly, a state might lose the entire funding as penalty or get more than the allotted amount.