INTRODUCTION
The delivery of reproductive and child health services is of utmost
importance and prime concern in India particularly due to high
population load with limited resources, poor infrastructure and huge
demand on healthcare system. The women & child group are considered
vulnerable group hence this topic needs essential attention.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had presented a challenge even for developed
healthcare systems around the world. A sense of fear gripped the whole
world due to pandemic and India is not an exception. The scarce
healthcare resources including manpower, infrastructure, transportation
(ambulance services) etc. have been largely deployed to tackle the
situation of pandemic of Covid-19. This shift has tremendous effect of
ongoing various health programmes running previously before the pandemic
era. The women and children’s seem to suffer more.
Pregnant mother & children’s are especially more vulnerable groups. The
OPD/IPD services also suffered a lot due to pandemic impact as well as
field health services are also compromised. The Pandemic situation
challenged not only the health system but also community. The people
have a sense of fear in meeting others particularly with peoples of
healthcare system until unless there is some sort of acute emergency.
Moreover most of the beds were reserved for covid-19 patients and as per
protocols the community and system both have constrains erupting from
the sudden situations of pandemic.
The advocacy for maternal and child health, women empowerment have been
done and emphasised by many national and international organisation for
several decades considering them especially vulnerable groups in times
of disaster such as pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly
disclosed the weakness of health system to protect above mentioned
vulnerable groups. The situation also produced a demand of separate
cadre to protect mother and child health in situations of disaster like
pandemic. It seems many protective beneficial health services were not
delivered in covid-19 era which may produce undesirable and detrimental
effects at mass level in coming future.
To understand the real impact of covid-19 on maternal and child health
the data analysis for the month of April to June 2020 is compared with
previous year 2019 data of 3 months and the facts are presented as table
and charts.