The Hindu : Front Page : Health cards for students soon

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 04, 2007
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Health cards for students soon

Karthik Subramanian

Nutritionally deficient students will be identified for special attention

TINDIVANAM: Government school students will soon have ‘health cards’ in addition to their report cards to monitor their health and nutrition, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Anbumani Ramadoss said on Monday.

He made the announcement at a function organised at his hometown, Tindivanam, some130 km from Chennai, where Intel Corporation chairman Craig R. Barrett and his wife Barbara Barrett were chief guests. They were there at St. Philomena Girls’ Higher Secondary School to monitor the ‘Children’s Health Monitoring System,’ developed by Tata Consultancy Services.

Intel is one of the partners in the project under its ‘World Ahead Program,’ an initiative for developing countries to provide access to information and communication technologies.

The pilot project in the school included digitisation of vital health statistics of the students, including parameters such as height, weight and eyesight. Two students from each class would act as ‘health scouts’ and feed the parameters twice a year into the computerised databank with the help of ‘health leaders’ (teachers). The statistics would be made accessible to government health officials.

Through the system, the government would be able to isolate nutritionally deficient students and provide special attention. “Based on the success of the pilot, we will be adding indices and come up with a state-wide and even nation-wide index,” the Minister added. Earlier, Mr. Barrett inaugurated a tele-health pilot project at Tindivanam Taluk Hospital, a 100-bed facility serving more than 2,10,000 residents. The project partners include Bangalore’s Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital and Chennai’s Sankara Nethralaya, apart from IT companies, Microsense, S.N. Infomatics and TCS.

Last November, Dr. Ramadoss and Mr. Barrett launched a similar health project at Baramati near Pune. The project at Tindivanam taluk is scaled up with the entire district health administration being networked.

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