What Is The Meaning Of RCH?

RCH-Reproductive and Child Health

RCH is an acronym for Reproductive and Child Health. It is a program that aims at combating and reducing the mortality rates of mothers, infants, and children and was launched in October 1997. During the first stage of the programme, there was a list of objectives which is aimed at achieving, which are as follows:

• To enhance the administration and supervision of the policy by adopting a participatory devising strategy thereby empowering organizations to maximum utilization of the project resource.

• To intensify the quality, coverage and the productiveness of the current Family wellness services.

• To eventually increase the range and coverage of the services pertaining to the Family welfare to ultimately provide a specified package of fundamental RCH assistance.

• Successively increase the range and content of existing wellness services concerning family welfare(FW) so as to incorporate more components

• Preference to be given to remote areas of cities or districts to cause an increase in the quality and improvement in the infrastructure of the FW services.

The outcomes of this stage of RCH where both positive and unsuccessful to an extent. The RCH is now at its second stage, RCH-II. Listed below are its aims:

• It aims at extending assistance and services to the complete sector of Family Welfare, even exceeding the scope of RCH.

• It has undertaken careful surveillance of the activities of the state and holds the state responsible for the overall development of the programme through its involvement.

• To provide better services, it has adopted the decentralization policy

• It permits states to regulate and enhance various features of the schemes as per convenience.

• It regularly upgrades the supervising and evaluation processes at various levels – the central level, state level and the district level to assure enhanced program implementation.

• It provides funding based on the performance, by rewarding and appreciating good performers and encouraging weak performers through assistance.

• Promotes cooperativeness and convergence throughout the sector in order to utilize resources and infrastructural facilities to the maximum.

• Combines financial assistance received from external sources.

Apart from this scheme, there is an immediate need to conduct more such associated training programmes to deal with a number of key concerns which were limited to immunization alone ignoring other crucial aspects. Multiple procedures and techniques are being implemented to evaluate the needs before expansion. Also, there is a need to expand family planning services to be able to meet the target of an average of 2 children per family.

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