Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission from his parliamentary constituency Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.

The Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission is one of the largest pan-India schemes for strengthening health care infrastructure across the country. It is in addition to the National Health Mission.

Key points of the Mission:

• Its objective is to fill gaps in public health infrastructure, especially in critical care facilities and primary care in both urban and rural areas. 

• It will provide support for 17,788 rural health and wellness centres in 10 high focus states. Further, 11,024 urban health and wellness centres will be established in all the states.

• Through this, critical care services will be available in all the districts of the country with more than five lakh population through exclusive critical care hospital blocks, while the remaining districts will be covered through referral services.

• People will have access to a full range of diagnostic services in the public healthcare system through a network of laboratories across the country, and integrated public health labs will be set up in all the districts.

• Under the scheme, a national institution for one health, four new national institutes for virology, a regional research platform for WHO South East Asia Region, nine biosafety level-III laboratories, and five new regional national centres for disease control will be set up.

• It targets to build an IT enabled disease surveillance system by developing a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels, in metropolitan areas. 

• Integrated Health Information Portal will be expanded to all states/UTs to connect all public health labs.

• It also aims at operationalisation of 17 new Public Health Units and strengthening of 33 existing Public Health Units at Points of Entry, for effectively detecting, investigating, preventing, and combating public health emergencies and disease outbreaks. 

• It will also work towards building up trained frontline health workforce to respond to any public health emergency.

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