At the seventh global conference of the Micronutrient Forum (MNF) in Accra, Ghana, Dr SM Ziauddin Hyder, the prime minister's special assistant for health, set out Bangladesh's plan to integrate nutrition services with primary healthcare. He spoke on the opening panel of the four-day conference, which began on 28 September and runs to 1 October under the theme of nutrition in a changing environment, Channel i Online reports.
He said the government has begun setting up and strengthening primary healthcare facilities in every union and urban ward. To link families and communities with the health system, it plans to recruit about 100,000 community health workers, and recruitment of 25,000 midwives is under way.
These workers and midwives, he said, will provide continuous care from the nutrition and reproductive health of adolescent girls and women through antenatal care, safe delivery, postnatal care and breastfeeding to newborn and child nutrition.
Nutrition, family planning, maternal and adolescent health, immunisation and child care have long been run as separate programmes, he said, although a woman and a family need them together at each stage of life; hence the need for integrated, life-cycle primary care. The government is working to move from a treatment-centred system to one built on prevention and health protection, with nutrition a routine part of care.
He said there is no shortage of scientific evidence for integrating nutrition into health services; what is needed is political commitment and sustainable financing. Tackling malnutrition is not for the health sector alone: food systems, education, safe water and sanitation, social protection, women's empowerment and local government must work together.
Research, he said, now needs to focus less on new evidence and more on how to deliver integrated services at scale, who is being left behind, and how to finance the work sustainably. Researchers, policymakers and development partners in nutrition, public health and food systems from many countries are attending.
Source: Channel i Online
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