Abstract

India has a vast public health infrastructure in the country with 23 391 primary health centres and 145 894 sub-centres providing health services to 72.2% of the country's population living in rural areas. Although the numbers look impressive their functional status needs to be improved in terms of physical infrastructure, manpower, equipment, drugs and other logistic supply that are very much needed for ensuring quality services. National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) launched aims to restructure the delivery mechanism for health towards providing universal access to equitable, affordable and quality healthcare, as a result of which Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) were formulated. The present work aims to study the infrastructure facilities and manpower in a sample of Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and their subcentres in the district of Nellore in the state of Andhra Pradesh in the east coast of India. A randomly selected sample of health institutions have been studied using structured and pre-tested performance. The data have been analysed with reference to Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS). It is a cross-sectional community based study done over a period of 1 year in Nellore district in the study setting of primary health centres and sub-centres. There are 62 primary health centres in Nellore district distributed in three divisions (Gudur, Nellore and Kavali). 25% of the primary health centres have been selected randomly that is, 15 PHCs taking five from each division randomly. Each PHC consists of a minimum of 6 sub-centres. 2 sub-centres from the PHCs which are already selected for the study is selected randomly and studied.