INDORE: All districts in Indore division have performed miserably in community-based review of children aged up to five years in the first four months of financial year with two of them failing to do it for even a single case, shows record.
Health officials in the Indore division did a community-based review of only 12% of the targeted 432 deaths of kids between April and July, showed a presentation put before the health commissioner during a meeting two days back.
Of those eight districts, Burhanpur and Khargone didn’t do community-based review of a single child death in that period. Regional Director (Health services) Indore division Dr Ashok Dagaria blamed COVID-19 for this.
Dr Dagaria said, “COVID-19 surge during the second wave in April and May made such surveys very risky. There are chances of catching infection in the surveying community.”
Explaining about community-based survey Dr Dagaria said, “Every district is allotted a target to review two deaths per block per month through community-based survey to know the reason behind it.”
Under it, the teams tried to know whether there was any delay in providing basic health care services, delay in admission, living conditions surrounding the house of child and other things, said Dr Dagaria.
These surveys helped in finding out reasons to help curb such deaths in future, added Dr Dagaria. On the major reason behind deaths of kids in division Dr Dagaria said, “Disease like pneumonia, diarrhoea, cholera, dehydration remains the major reason behind child death. But, there are other serious health conditions for it.”
The authorities tried their best and performed well in facility- based child death review, said Dr Dagaria. This is the second kind of death review, where a case file with history, type of treatment and other details of children was sent for review to experts to find out the cause of death.
In this review, the division reviewed 75% of the targeted 648 deaths. The district wise bifurcation showed Burhanpur, Alirajpur and Indore achieved cent percent of their target in the first four month of this financial year.
Khargone remained the worst performing while reviewing only 10% deaths through this method followed by Dhar with 45%. The other districts including Barwani, Khandwa and Jhabua achieved 94%, 96% and 88% facility-based review targets.
