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.