Keshvendra Kumar- Mission,Director, NHM, MoH&FW, Government of Kerala started off by saying that ‘Hridyam – for little hearts’ programme initiated by the Kerala government to support children with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD), is a unique and innovative model that has successfully provided surgical care to a lot of children with CHD within the state.
Kumar gave a background as to the reason why the government initiated this programme. He said Kerala is said have the lowest Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) in the country. Currently, the state has around 8-9 IMR and most of which are due to CHD that causes 25 per cent of the IMR and other infectious diseases. Therefore, the state decided to come up with a comprehensive treatment programme which will not only address CHDs among infants but will also bring down the IMR further.
He informed, “Prior to this programme, only one government centre was offering CHD care for children. With the launch of this new programme, we have four centres that provide cardiac care to children. In future, we will be adding one to two centres under Hridyam.”
Kumar further explained on how Hridyam also has a good system for governance as well. Hridyam is a web based solution for system management of care of children. This can be used as web-based registry for CHD cases across Kerala, monitoring the progress of programme envisaged for management of children with CHD, identifying the bottlenecks for implementing the protocols established at any point, understanding the case status and response time for systems in place and ultimately measuring the outcomes of the programme.
“We have constantly being working on furthering the scale of this project. We have started empanelling private hospitals in this programme. So far, we have empanelled four hospitals to increase the capacity of our programme,” he added.
Since the CHD needs continuous care, the government has also developed a follow-up system. The government has also ensured that through this programme, parents of new born babies get enough information of the disease. Also, the treatment provided to children with CHD is completely free.
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