GAP ANALYSIS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PRIMARY HEALTH CENTRES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SCHOOL HEALTH PROGRAMME OF NRHM

Child health is an important component of family welfare which is a major determinant of human development and hence the economic growth of any country. Several government schemes are available to take appropriate care of the children under the national rural and urban health mission. The child health and immunization programme, school health programme, and the adolescent and sexual health programme take over at different stages of development of a child. The School Health Programme has a target of completing two screenings per year covering all the government and aided schools. The success of the programme depends on the implementation of the various strategies adopted by the state from the preamble set by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Weighted scoring of a checklist to assess the various Primary Health Centres was chosen and a gap in the implementation of the programme was studied The reasons for the gap in the system was analysed and whether they were associated or not with the success of the programme was found with the help of a Chi Square test. The three main attributes which contributed to the success of the programme were ‘training given to the staff’, ‘supply of resources’ and the ‘parental cooperation’. The study shows that the strength of association of training given to the staff with the success of the programme was stronger when compared to the other two attributes. This implies that success of the school health programme will depend largely on the staff training. Training is complete when the adopted cascade strategy of training the state level trainers who in turn train the district and mandal level trainers and ultimately reach the grass root level programme implementers or the PHC staff and the school teachers. This has a multitude of effects where, when the training aspect is looked into, all the other aspects of success fall in place.