The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has rolled out a risk-based approach to tracking newborns and young children under a new programme that will identify those considered “at-risk” and provide them with additional home visits, closer monitoring and intensified follow-up.
The programme places particular emphasis on the period from birth to three years, bringing together health and developmental monitoring with nutrition, infant and young-child feeding, nurturing care, early identification of danger signs and timely referral.
This will be a part of the Samagra Shishu Bal Swasthya Karyakram (SSBSK), which was launched in June by the Union Health Ministry and has brought newborn and young-child home-based care under a single programme covering children from birth to 36 months. The programme replaces separate approaches under Home-Based Newborn Care (HBNC) and Home-Based Young Child Care (HBYC) with a risk-stratified continuum of care.
The new approach was discussed at a two-day national workshop on SSBSK held in Maharashtra on August 24-25, where health officials from all 36 states and Union Territories reviewed its implementation.
A key component of the programme is the identification of “at-risk” newborns and children, who will receive more intensive follow-up than children without identified health, nutrition, growth or developmental concerns. The programme provides for additional home visits, closer monitoring and strengthened referral support for such children.
The government will also use the Shaishav App, a digital platform developed to support implementation of SSBSK. The application will enable health workers to digitally identify and line-list at-risk children, schedule and track home visits, monitor referrals and follow up on cases.
The app is also intended to create a longitudinal health profile for each child, allowing information and follow-up to continue as the child moves from the newborn period into early childhood.
The move is aimed at addressing gaps in follow-up, with the Health Ministry stressing that children identified with health, nutrition, growth or developmental concerns should not be lost between community-level identification, referral and treatment.
For children identified as at risk, the programme also provides for joint home visits by frontline health workers and primary healthcare teams. These visits are intended to allow coordinated assessment, clinical oversight, counselling and referral, strengthening the link between home-based care and health facilities.
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