What is in news : Prime Minister is set to inaugurate Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission , what is being touted as “India’s largest scheme to scale-up health infrastructure”.

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• Aim – Ensuring a robust public health infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, capable of responding to public health emergencies or disease outbreak.
• Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission, an addition to the National Health Mission, will provide support to 17,788 rural Health and Wellness Centres in 10 ‘high focus’ states and establish 11,024 urban Health and Wellness Centres across the country.
• Mission’s objective – fill critical gaps in public health infrastructure, especially in critical care facilities and primary care in both the urban and rural areas.
• It will ensure access to critical care services in all districts of the country with over five lakh population through ‘Exclusive Critical Care Hospital Blocks’. The remaining districts will be covered through referral services, giving people access to “a full range of diagnostic services” through a network of laboratories across the country.
• Also aims to establish an IT-enabled disease surveillance system through a network of surveillance laboratories at block, district, regional and national levels.
• All the public health labs will be connected through the Integrated Health Information Portal, which will be expanded to all states and UTs.
• In light of the coronavirus pandemic, the mission aims at ensuring a robust system for “detecting, investigating, preventing, and combating public health emergencies and disease outbreaks”. For this, 17 new public health units will be set up, while the 33 existing public health units will be strengthened. It will also train frontline and healthcare workers to respond to public health emergencies effectively.
• Apart from this, the mission will set up other infrastructure, including a national institution for one health, four national institutes for virology, a regional research platform for WHO’s South East Asia region, nine biosafety level-III laboratories, and five regional centres for disease control.