How healthy is our primary health care workforce? A cross-sectional study

Progress of any nation depends on the health status of the population. A nation's health directly and indirectly depends on the quality of health-care facilities and how healthy the health care workforce is in that country. To achieve the health for all goal and to provide for most of the health services like maternal health services, child health services, nutrition, vaccination, and family planning services, the Indian health system have multipurpose health workers (female and male) and Accredited Social Health Activist to provide these services at the grass-root level. There is a paucity of literature revealing the health problems or the health status of grassroot level primary health care worker in India or abroad.

All the grass-root level health workers, i.e., MPHWF and ASHAs in the BMC area were included in this cross-sectional study. Data was collected using a semi-structured interview schedule, followed by general examination and anthropometry using standard procedures.

Half of the study participants 111 (50.2%) were having some or other kind of health issues during the data collection time; among them, 107 (48.4%) had a chronic disease condition. 10% of them had diabetes mellitus. More than half of the study participants 141 (63.8%) were found to be obese and hypertension was found in 27 (12.2%) study participants. 21 (9.5%) study participants were under high depression. One-fourth of the health workers among those who could conceive had not gone for antenatal check-ups and more than one-third (33.5%) never consumed iron and folic acid (IFA) tablets during their first pregnancy. 19.1% have children with incomplete immunization as per age. One-fifth of the participants know about the balanced diet and half of them could not ensure that their family eat a balanced diet and in the majority, the diet was calorie deficient as per the daily requirement.

There is an urgent need to formulate a policy to improve the health of the primary care grass-root level health-care workers and regular on-the-job training on nutrition needs to be given to them.