The chronic shortfall of specialist skills in CHCs, cripples our ability to universalize comprehensive primary health care. Such skills are essential to provide referral support and continuity of care to primary care providers and patients. The persistence of the problem and the failure of many efforts to address this shortfall should lead us to introspect on basic design flaws. Drawing on national and international experience, we discuss how this gap can and must be addressed and that too on a priority basis…

We are drawing attention to this recent publication from the regional WHO. In this introduction we highlight one context – the shift from selective to comprehensive care. We hope these case stories help the reader understand the complex nature of this shift, and provides grounds for optimism, that despite the challenges, such a change is feasible…..

The ESI is an amazing institution covering over 10% of the population. The ESI is conceptualized within a health rights framework and offers a basket of benefits that no other insurance programme even attempts. Yet when experts talk of UHC or publicly funded health insurance, the ESI is almost never mentioned. Performance in terms of delivery of benefits is poor, but this is not due to lack of funds, as the ESI has a huge surplus. This conversation is about how ESI must be saved, re-vitalized and expanded, as part of the struggle to achieve the right to healthcare and Health for All. And given some of the directions of reform that are being pushed, it it is also about how not to lose an asset that we never knew we had.

Last year, the ICMR initiated a process re-revisit WHO’s weight and height standards for children on grounds that these are not appropriate in the Indian context. But is this valid? Are current growth standards overstating India’s malnutrition crisis? In this conversation, Dr Yogesh Jain talks to Prof. Rakesh Lodha, AIIMS and Dr Pavitra Mohan,BHS, ( all of leading pediatric practitioners and academicians with experience in public policy) to clarify the issues and concerns underlying the current controversy and the values and goals that should inform our choice of standards.