Srinagar, July 29: Chief Secretary Arun Kumar Mehta Saturday asked the health professionals to screen the entire population of Jammu and Kashmir for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like hypertension, diabetes and common types of cancers.
An official spokesman in a statement issued here said that chairing a review meeting of the performance of National Health Mission (NHM), the chief secretary said that the NCDs were a major cause of deaths across the world so their early diagnosis could lead to better prevention and cure of such diseases.
He asked for organising camps all across J&K for conducting free of cost screening of people.
Mehta also observed that there was still scope for improvement in institutional births despite it being ahead of the national average.
He also emphasised on further improving the ranking of J&K in SDG goals related to health. The chief secretary asked the department to digitise all the health records of the patients so that it was accessible to them anywhere by using their ABHA numbers. He also advised them to allow them to add their previous records to it for saving the same for posterity.
Mehta enquired from the officers about the defunct machinery and poorly managed infrastructure in the J&K hospitals.
He said that the department should make a plan to repair all such machines and upgrade the infrastructure to put it to optimal use for the benefit of people.
The chief secretary asked for the mechanism of screening the children of J&K by the department.
He directed them to visit the far-off schools and anganwadicentres for screening of children enrolled there.
Mehta directed the concerned to extend every support to children requiring any kind of medical assistance and popularise it so that people come forward readily to screen their children at their early age.
He also stressed on assessing all the health facilities of J&K right from the sub-centres on a set of parameters.
The chief secretary told them to repeat the exercise periodically and put the results in public domain so that people were able to see for themselves about the status of these health facilities besides giving them opportunity to make improvements.
He also asked for creating awareness among the people about the initiatives like e-Sanjeevani, e-sahaj, and Tele-MANAS so that people were able to seek assistance, guidance, counseling, and support through such IT and telecommunication tools from the comforts of their homes.
Providing insights into the working of NHM here, Secretary Health Bhupinder Kumar informed the meeting that all adults aged 30 years or less had been enrolled into the NCD portal.