Pregnant women to be ferried for antenatal checkups

Pregnant women across Karnataka will now have vehicles arranged by the state health department to get antenatal checkups.

The service will be in addition to the existing Nagu Magu scheme under which 200 vehicles ferry postnatal mothers and newborns from government health facilities to their respective homes.

Started in 2014, vehicles under Nagu Magu are deployed at each district and taluk hospital. This service will be extended to pregnant women, too, under a new project named ‘Chiguru’. A meeting in this regard was held with Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar and department officials on Tuesday.

The state government may use its existing Nagu Magu ambulances for Chiguru, too, so that the ‘108’ ambulance services are not disrupted while catering to other patients. The health department is devising a plan to ferry women for each of their four antenatal checkups during the nine months of pregnancy to get scans and blood tests done at one go without having to rely on public transport.

As many as 7,97,624 pregnant women were registered in Karnataka on the government’s Anmol portal by the end of January. “The ideal time to rule out congenital anomalies in the foetus is during 18-20 weeks of pregnancy. Doctors can also know the location of the placenta and detect twin pregnancies, if any, during this time,” said Dr M Indumathi, Project
Director, Reproductive and Child Health, Health Department.

According to her, four to five women at the taluk panchayat level can be taken together and they can get their scans done along with relevant investigations, which are already done free of charge. They will be brought back, too.

The health department has already struck MoUs with ultrasound and pathology labs to provide free investigations for pregnant women. But the women have been going on their own to these diagnostic facilities.

“We want to reduce the out-of-pocket expenditure on conveyance. Apart from scans and blood tests,” Dr Indumathi said. The additional chief secretary of the health department has asked for adding other investigations, she added.

The ‘Chiguru’ service will not entail any additional expenditure as the department will utilise the existing infrastructure only, she clarified.