Health Systems Research: A precursor to evidence-based collaborative city health planning in urban India

Rapidly expanding urban poor population offers complex challenges of vulnerabilities, resulting in adverse health outcomes. Public health provisioning in urban slums is mostly unstructured, fragile, and with minimal outreach. Service utilization is compromised, owing to issues of accessibility, affordability, quality, and delayed care-seeking. Government of India’s (GoI) National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) focuses on strengthening the public health system to ensure quality services for urban poor. Lack of formative information and disaggregated data is currently hampering the formulation of responsive policies and programming.

Study objectives included:

• To understand community needs, behaviors and perception for Maternal & Newborn Health
• To explore various factors affecting care-seeking for MNH
• To assess the preparedness of the urban health system for providing MNH services at various levels of care