Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission

In news- Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently inaugurated Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.

About the mission-

It is India’s largest scheme to scale-up health infrastructure.
It aims at ensuring a robust system for “detecting, investigating, preventing, and combating public health emergencies and disease outbreaks”.
It is an addition to the National Health Mission, which will provide support to 17,788 rural Health and Wellness Centres in 10 ‘high focus’ states and establish 11,024 urban Health and Wellness Centres across the country.
The mission’s objective is to “fill critical gaps in public health infrastructure, especially in critical care facilities and primary care in both the urban and rural areas.”
It will ensure access to critical care services in all districts of the country with over five lakh population through ‘Exclusive Critical Care Hospital Blocks’.
The remaining districts will be covered through referral services.
Integrated public health labs will be set up in all districts, giving people access to “a full range of diagnostic services” through a network of laboratories across the country.
It aims to establish an IT-enabled disease surveillance system through a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels.
All the public health labs will be connected through the Integrated Health Information Portal, which will be expanded to all states and UTs.
It will train frontline and healthcare workers to respond to public health emergencies effectively.
The mission will set up other infrastructure, including a national institution for one health, four national institutes for virology, a regional research platform for WHO’s South East Asia region, nine biosafety level-III laboratories, and five regional centres for disease control.