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Dr. Rakesh Kumar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare,
Government of India, appreciated UNICEF taking the initiative to hold a 2-day
Consultation on an important topic. He was particularly happy to see people who were
hands-on in the field, conducting Supportive Supervision, attending the Consultation.
According to him there were a number of constraints which were impeding progress
on this front. Human resource was a major constraint, with unfilled vacancies. In
states like Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh they were as high as 40% and in others
close to 25-30%. Resource constraint was a major issue and so was the inability
to ensure quality standards and clear communication. If earlier the role of ANM
was specific (ANC, RI etc), today, everything that was decided at the ministry level,
landed at her doorstep.
With greater responsibility there was a paradigm shift in roles and responsibilities of
frontline workers. Lack of guidelines and clear terms of reference served as strong
grey areas. Compounding the problem was shortage of supervisors. According
to Dr. Kumar, while formulating guidelines was important, more critical was the
need to develop a full-fledged policy that could look at Supportive Supervision
in totality. The goal was to ultimately have an effective and efficient system in
place. The policy should outline resource availability, roles, number of visits which
a supervisor should make, kind of transport facility s/he should avail of and manner
in which information should be shared. The policy document should serve as a
solution that goes beyond standalone effective successful pilots, leading to an
overall systems improvement.
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Consultation on Supportive Supervision to Strengthen
Capacity of Frontline Workers and Service Providers