Popularising healthcare hotline

At a time when people of low-income bracket are at their wit's end to consult doctors for common diseases, the government's healthcare facility at phone number 16263 can play a vital role for them in getting primary do's and don'ts. The number is a multidimensional healthcare line as it provides people's treatment guidelines as well as information of hospitals, specialised doctors and ambulances.
But the facility called 'Shastho Batayon' is yet to be made popular due to lack of adequate publicity in this regard. A roundtable on the healthcare hotline in Dhaka on Monday focused on the government's innovative emergency healthcare number. People can get facilities of primary treatment, including doctor's advice and prescription, of any diseases by calling the number which will help them solve their problem at home, the roundtable was told.
The roundtable highlighted a very pertinent issue: affordability of the poor in accessing the facility. It urged the government and related departments to reduce the call charge, now Tk 0.60 per minute.  The number is being used by people frequently. More than 1.3 million calls have been made so far since its beginning in September 2015, and around 6,000 calls are made per day, according to Dr Nizam Uddin Ahmed, chief executive officer of Synesis IT, an organisation maintaining the call service.
Health and Family Welfare Minister Mohammad Nasim, who attended the roundtable, said, the poor and people with small earnings will be very benefited by using the line if they could be informed about it. He assured all government steps to make the number popular and more active.
One easiest way to make the healthcare hotline popular is to use the 4,501 union information service centres (UISCs) for the purpose. With the opening of 4,501 UISCs, all unions of the country have now been linked with the information super highway, moving the nation a step forward towards digital Bangladesh as well as involving grassroots people with mainstream of development. With the expansion of the ICT facilities, a huge number of people are already getting online and offline facilities such as different government forms and information about agriculture, health, education, legal aid, human rights and employment.
By using the UISCs, the government can make its plan for universal health coverage (UHC) a success. Under UHC, people are expected to have access to needed quality health care services without any financial hardship. Although the country has been moving ahead in extending health care services to its people, there are still disparities in accessing services by various groups. Financial difficulty is still a very important barrier in accessing health care. The country's annual per capita health expenditure is $27. Of this, 64 per cent comes from individual pocket which is one of the highest and has a serious impoverishing effect on household economy. The hotline at the UISCs can meet the challenges of an epidemiological shift in disease burden where infectious diseases are taking a back seat and chronic diseases are coming up.
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