Neo-natal Mortality Rate (NMR) – one of the metric that hasn’t improved adequately across India. Discuss the measures which will help India to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for NMR.
Refer – Live mint
IAS Parliament 6 years
KEY POINTS
Neo-natal Mortality Rate
· It is the number of resident newborns in a specified geographic area dying at less than 28 days of age divided by the number of resident live births for the same geographic area for a specified time period and multiplied by 1,000.
UN SDG for NMR
· All countries will aim to reduce neo-natal mortality (NMR) to at least as low as 12 per 1,000 live births by 2030.
· According to World Bank statistics, India moved from 33 (NMR) in 2010 to 28 in 2015.
Issues
· Low number of operational C-section points in most districts.
· This implies longer travel times for women in labour, creating distress and overburdening facilities, which in turn cannot provide adequate care, thereby endangering the newborn.
· Lack of specialized care required for conditions like asphyxia, prematurity or sepsis.
· Most of the clinical staffs were incompetent of basic technical skills and even if competent, they don’t practise them.
· The quality of nurse and pregnant women interactions is often poor.
· Coverage of antenatal visits by front-line workers is alarmingly low.
· Complex and multiple registers often under-report or over-estimate the neo-natal deaths.
Solutions
· Need for 2-3 emergency obstetric points (C-section points) in every district.
· Special newborn care units (SNCUs) with round the clock monitoring should be increased.
· SNCUs need to be integrated with newborn stabilization units at secondary facilities like community health centres through a strong referral system.
· Development agencies like UNICEF conduct specialized training programmes for clinical staff.
· States should mandate such training and the practice of these basic protocols.
· Field data collection processes need to be simplified as like wherever possible, technology like mobile apps should be used.
· Availability of basic diagnostic equipment, expansion of front-line worker capacity and their increased accountability towards data coverage and quality of antenatal visits are vital to achieve SDG goal set for NMR.
