Free health service to poor soon
A report states that the government is planning to provide free health services to poor people at hospitals which have 25 beds or more and at Primary Health Centers (PHCs) across the country.
The cabinet last month had passed a comprehensive guidline in this regard.
"The health ministry will bring the guideline into effect by April this year," informed Dr. Babu Ram Marasini, deputy health administrator at the ministry. "Several teams have started visiting hospitals in the district in this connection."
The ministry has already allocated Rs. 60 million for the first phase of the program, which will cover 26 hospitals and PHCs in districts with a low human development index.
Next year, the ministry will expand the free services to 33 more hospitals and PHCs in several other districts. However, it has not said anything about PHCs that don't have their own premises. Out of 208 PHCs, 55 don't have their own buildings.
People coming from extremely poor families will not have to pay even a registration fee, while those from poor families will pay Rs. 50 as registration fee. However, both types of people will get free treatment and medicine and all other services supposed to be provided by the hospital. Even after being discharged from hospital or a PHC, they will get free medicine for one week.
Those entitled to free treatment will be identified and provided with ID cards. The cards will have to be renewed every year. The poor, disabled, helpless, elderly and 48,000 women health volunteers have been categorized by the guideline as eligible groups for the service.
According to the guideline, people whose annual family income is not sufficient to feed them for a year fall under the poor category whereas those who can't manage to feed themselves even for six months are in the ultra poor group.
Although the guideline has not specified the mechanism for identifying the poor and ultra poor, the ministry says there will be monitoring and supervision committees at national, regional and district levels to identify the groups.
Similarly, the guideline hasn't said anything on whether or not the ministry will compensate for regular income lost by hospitals by providing free services to the poor.
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