ABSTRACT
Background: This paper estimates the costs and benefits of investing in education interventions and specific child marriage programs to reduce child marriage in India. Child marriage in India remains highly prevalent despite considerable progress in the last decade or more, associated, in particular, with a decline in poverty. The economic consequences of the COVID 19 pandemic are likely to reverse these gains, meaning that the interventions to reduce child marriage evaluated in this paper assume even greater importance.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has reinforced the importance of having sufficient, well-distributed and competent health workforce. In addition to improving health outcomes, increased investment has the potential to generate employment, increase labour productivity along with fostering economic growth. With COVID-19 highlighting the gaps in human resources for health in India, there is a need to better and empirically understand the level of required investment for increasing the production of health workforce in India for achieving the UHC/SDGs. METHODS: The study used data from a range of sources including National Health Workforce Account 2018, Periodic Labour Force Survey 2018-19, population projection of Census of India, and review of government documents and reports. The study estimated shortages in the health workforce and required investments to achieve recommended health worker: population ratio thresholds by the terminal year of the SDGs 2030. RESULTS: Our results suggest that to meet the threshold of 34.5 skilled health worker per 10,000 population, there will be a shortfall of 0.16 million doctors and 0.65 nurses/midwives in the total stock of human resources for health by the year 2030. The shortages at the same threshold will be much higher (0.57 million doctors and 1.98 million nurses/midwives) in active health workforce by 2030. The shortages are even higher when compared with a higher threshold of 44.5 health workers per 10,000 population. The estimated investment for the required increase in the production of health workforce ranges from INR 523 billion to 2,580 billion for doctors. For nurses/midwives, the required investment is INR 1,096 billion. Such investment during 2021-25 has the potential of an additional employment generation within the health sector to the tune of 5.4 million and contribute to national income to the extent of INR 3,429 billion annually. Conclusion: India needs to significantly increase the production of doctors and nurses(/midwives) through investing in opening up of new medical colleges. Nursing sector should be prioritized to encourage talents to join nursing profession and provide quality education. India needs to set-up a benchmark of skill-mix ratio and provide attractive employment opportunities in health sector to increase the demand and absorb the new supply of graduates.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Familial Mediterranean FeverABSTRACT
Since the recent introduction of several viable vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, vaccination uptake has become the key factor that will determine our success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that game theory and social network models should be used to guide decisions pertaining to vaccination programmes for the best possible results. In the months following the introduction of vaccines, their availability and the human resources needed to run the vaccination programmes have been scarce in many countries. Vaccine hesitancy is also being encountered from some sections of the general public. We emphasize that decision-making under uncertainty and imperfect information, and with only conditionally optimal outcomes, is a unique forte of established game-theoretic modelling. Therefore, we can use this approach to obtain the best framework for modelling and simulating vaccination prioritization and uptake that will be readily available to inform important policy decisions for the optimal control of the COVID-19 pandemic.