Skill for Life, Save a Life
6-Jun-2017: ‘Skill for Life, Save a Life’ initiative to promote skill development in the health sector
Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare has launched the ‘Skill for Life, Save a Life’ initiative. India enjoys a demographic dividend as more than 65% youth are below the age of 35 years and the Government is determined to seize this opportunity by providing adequate skills and employability to the youth for a strong foundation for continued and sustainable growth. ‘Skills for Life, Save a Life’ Initiative’ aims to upscale the quantity and quality of trained professionals in the healthcare system. Under this initiative various courses are planned to be initiated targeting specific competencies for healthcare professionals as well as for general public.
Skilling the youth enhances the employability and skilled India will help the nation reap rich dividends. This shall reduce the gap between expectations of employment of the youth and the actual job they get. Skill enhances economy of the country, too by reducing the gap between demand and supply of trained and skilled manpower in every field. The potential for skilled healthcare workers and professionals is immense in the country. Such courses ensure that the health sector gets the adequate skilled health workers.
Curriculum has been designed by National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW) and AIIMS, Delhi. The Health Minister highlighted that in India 1,324 accidents occur on roads every day and a life is lost every 4 minutes and measures taken in the first 10 minutes can save a life. It was thus announced that the Ministry is initiating its’ ‘Skill a Life, Save a Life’ program by launching First Responder course for professionals as well as general public, to be conducted in Central and State government training institutes from the next month across the country in each district, to empower every single citizen of the country to be the first person to provide first aid and initial care in case of an emergency.
India is working towards the attainment of the global mandate of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) for providing affordable, accountable and appropriate health care of assured quality to the fellow citizens, which is possible through substantive and strategic investment in the health workforce. This is part of a larger plan and program for ensuring Universal Health Coverage. This program will provide trained and skilled people by broadening the base to include the community. Through such programs, we create a mass of ‘first responder’ who complements the specialists/experts to fill vacuum of adequate trained professionals.
Central Health Service (CHS)
1-May-2017: First-ever Induction Training Programme for new recruits of Central Health Services (CHS)
The Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Shri J.P. Nadda inaugurated the first-ever induction training programme for the newly appointed General Duty Medical Officers (GDMOs) of the Central Health Service Cadre at National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW).
This is the first time such a foundation training programme is being undertaken. This will also orient you to your roles and responsibilities about healthcare delivery systems in the country, legal ethical issues, and schemes programme of the Ministry, OPD, emergencies, pharmacies, administration AYUSH, Yoga, etc. The course provides an opportunity to expand ones horizons, learn the philosophy and depth of life.
The nine week course especially designed for the new recruits will enable the medical officers to broaden their knowledge base, confidence level and experience in public health facilities. This course will contribute greatly to the public healthcare of the country. With technical skills, soft skills are also important as doctors deal with lives and wellbeing of patients.
Central Health Service (CHS) Cadre is a cadre governed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and its doctors are working all over the country providing health care services to a large number of people. CHS has four sub-cadres, namely, GDMOs, Teaching, Non-Teaching Specialists and Public Health, with a sanctioned strength of more than 4000 of which the GDMOs constitute the largest chunk, more than 2000.
On an average, every year around 400 to 600 doctors are recruited through UPSC. Incidentally, throughout the under-graduate and post-graduate education and thereafter, these doctors are not been trained in the areas of management, supervision, leadership, communication, conduction of office procedures, etc. The training module is designed to fill this gap so that they can look after the administration of the organization and implementation of various national health programmes for which they have very limited exposure.
Bio-Pharmaceuticals
30-June-2017: Industry-Academia Collaborative Mission for Accelerating Discovery Research to Early Development for Biopharmaceuticals
It is time for India to capitalize now on our unique strengths and overcome any hurdles to ensure success in the bio-pharmaceutical market.
The first ever Industry-Academia mission to accelerate biopharmaceutical development in India has been approved by the Government of India. The program named Innovate in India (i3) will witness an investment of USD 250 million with USD 125 million as a loan from World Bank and aspires to create an enabling ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship and indigenous manufacturing in the sector.
This Mission of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science & Technology will be implemented by Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) - a Public Sector Undertaking of DBT. The programme will specifically focus on the development of new vaccines, bio-therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices to better address the rising burden of diseases in the country. It will also bring isolated centres of excellence together, enhance regional capabilities and strengthen the current bio-clusters network in terms of capacities as well as quantity and quality of output. The programme will help deliver 6-10 new products in the next five years, create several dedicated facilities for next-generation skills, and hundreds of jobs in the process. It will provide young entrepreneurs the confidence as well as the systemic support to pursue their aspirations in biotechnological innovation, and transform India into a global hub for cutting-edge biotechnology research and development.
As a flagship program of the Government of India in collaboration with World Bank, it promises to boost the growth curve for domestic biopharma in India by accelerating the translation of research concepts into viable products, supporting clinical validation, enabling sustainable networks for collaboration between industry and academia, and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystem amongst many others. Currently India has only 2.8% share in the global biopharmaceutical market, the program would elevate this to 5% resulting in an additional business opportunity of 16 Billion USD.
The oversight to the program would be provided by the Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee comprising of members from various Ministries; and would be supported by Program Technical Advisory Group comprising of global and national leaders from industry and academia. The program thereby stands unique in its approach with involvement of global experts, industry leaders and World Bank in driving it and ensuring world class biomedical products are born out of the initiative. This Mission is anticipated to be a game changer for the Indian Biopharmaceutical industry.