Health Care And Family Welfare: Alternative Strategies

In order to gauge the deficiencies ingrained in the health care delivery services in India, several committees have been set up from time to time. All these Committees put forward several recommendations besides laying much emphasis upon linear expansion of modern health care delivery services. By mid-Eighties however, it was realized that optimal level of health and family welfare delivery services could not be achieved through simple linear expansion of the existing health care delivery services. It was realised that no planning and strategy, howsoever meticulous, would be successful in the absence of analysis of indigenous system of health care which continues to be in bogue in the tribal areas even today. Recognising this position the present study was undertaken at the behest of Indian Council of Medical Research to assess the existing delivery system of health care in tribal region of Bihar and to evolve region-specific alternative strategies. This study is an outcome of the effort of the members of research team comprising specialists from social and medical sciences. This book on the basis of critical evaluation of the gap between orchestrated provision of health care delivery in the tribal region of Bihar and implementation of the same, stresses the need for formulating an alternative strategy by strengthening the existing health delivery system and also developing a system in which the application of traditional system of healing is encouraged. The systems of healing-modern of indigenous-need to co-exist an independent unit.