BHUBANESWAR: Odisha has slipped to bottom three of 21 large states in the overall performance of various health indicators.
As per the second round of the health index report released by Niti Aayog on Tuesday, the state came down one rank compared to the previous year to be placed at 19th position.
The performance of the state has been taken into account from 2014-15 (base year) to 2015-16 (reference year).
Odisha’s progress has been categorised among aspirant States along with Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
It is among nine states whose performance has not improved compared to the previous study period.
The Niti Aayog report said health index score reduced mostly due to worsening of full immunisation rate and tuberculosis (TB) treatment success rate.
Odisha is at the bottom with lowest percentage of full immunisation coverage.
From 85.3 per cent coverage in 2015-16 to 59.8 per cent in 2017-18, the State reported more than 25 percentage point decline in the fully-immunised children.
Though Odisha had an impressive increase in the case notification of TB with the rate increasing from 99 in 2016 to 159 in 2017 per one lakh population, treatment success rate of new microbiologically confirmed tuberculosis cases have slipped from 88.9 per cent in 2015 to 72.5 per cent in 2016.
Among the larger states, Odisha had the highest Neonatal Mortality Rate (NMR), which hovered from 35 to 32 neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births from 2015 to 2016.
Similarly, the state had the highest Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) - the probability of dying before completing the age of five - which is a critical indicator of child survival.
It reflects a gamut of health and non-health factors that affect child survival.
However, there was a significant improvement in Cardiac Care Units (CCUs) to provide life-saving and critical procedures and interventions.
A senior Health official said despite significant improvement in many health indices, the decrease in full immunisation coverage was due to non-administration of Measles-Rubella (MR) vaccination in the last few months of 2017-18.
“As per guidelines, the gap between two live attenuated vaccines should not be less than 28 days. As Japaneses Encephalitis campaign was held from November 27 to December 31, 2017 and MR Campaign from January 29 to April 6, 2018, measles vaccine was not given to eligible children in the last few months of 2017-18 for safety of the children which resulted in low full immunisation coverage.
"Full immunisation coverage has improved to 87 per cent during 2018-19,” he clarified.
He, however, attributed the reduced TB treatment success rate to data entry issues in newly introduced NIKSHAY portal.
Odisha could only enter data for 72.5 per cent treatment success during the period, he added.