In a bid to ensure an effective implementation of immunisation programme, the Union health ministry recently set up a call centre to keep a track and verify children and mothers getting vaccinated across the states.
Known as mother and child tracking system centre, so far 80,00,000 pregnant women and 31,00,000 children have been registered by the states on the monitoring system set up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
The states were informed earlier to send information on both mother and child, like “expected date of delivery, delivery type, complications, delivery date, child name, sex of the child, child weight, along with the phone number etc.”. The officials working in the call centre have now started verifying the authenticity of data by making calls.
According to the Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, the system will help bring down maternal mortality rate (MMR) and infant mortality rate (IMR) as “we could actually get to know if the money sent by us is well spent,” he said.
So far there was no such system to ensure effective implementation of the immunisation programme which is sponsored by the government of India which not only provides the vaccines but also meets the operational costs.
“So far the ministry depended on the data sent by states. So we would have to believe on the data sent by the states,” said a senior official in the ministry.
The idea to set up a centre was mooted by the Union health minister after he answered a Parliament question on the number of children getting vaccinated.
Launched only this week by the minister, the system has started churning out results too. “The verification process has started. We make calls to ensure if the details sent by the states are correct or not. We have seen that about 600 calls were not answered, which could mean that the information sent by the state may not be correct. This way, we could get to bottom of the problem,” added another official.