Abstract
A primary health care-based health system should ensure universal coverage and access to services that are both equity-enhanced and acceptable to the population. Accredited Social Health Activist being the grass root level worker, the success of National Rural Health Mission in India depends on how efficiently is ASHA able to perform. ASHA plays an important role in reaching primary health to rural areas. She is an inevitable component in bringing health services to the grass root level by creating awareness on health and mobilizing the community towards local health planning. This has resulted into increased utilization of maternal and child health services. She has an important role in motivating people to use existing health care services and acts as a link between community and the health care system. She collaborates with local self governments in addressing the health needs of the society. After implementation of the programme, some health indicators have shown decline like Maternal Mortality Ratio, Infant Mortality Rate and Total fertility Rate. With the involvement of ASHA, the country has been making remarkable strides in the improvement of maternal health. ASHA’s have become a backbone of National Rural Health Mission and have become an integral part of social life in the villages of India. From the perspective of the shortage of human resources for primary health care in the country, ASHAs are an important resource complementing the health system and facilitating efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
Highlights
Social development of a nation is dependent on the health of its population
Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) becomes an inevitable component in providing primary health care to the village level by creating awareness on health and its social determinants
They have mobilized the community towards local health planning that increased utilization of primary health care and placed the health in the hands of the people
Summary
Social development of a nation is dependent on the health of its population. India has made considerable progress towards the reduction of Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) and Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), the current pace of decline was not sufficient to achieve the goals and targets by 2015 under Millennium Developmental Goals (MDG). A core strategy was to strengthen the existing Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs) in terms of both infrastructure and human resources, with a view to achieving a number of goals to reduce infant and maternal mortality as well as the incidence of several communicable diseases. One of the main core strategies suggested under the NRHM was the creation of the much touted Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) to strengthen the decentralized village and district level health planning and management. The NRHM Program worked by providing every village in India with a trained female community health activist volunteer. Each of these community health workers, referred to as ASHA, is between the ages of 24-45 and literate, with a minimum level of 8 years of formal education. The ASHA usually fulfills 10 critical functions for the community where she operates [3] is as follows-
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