Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow by selecting the most appropriate option:
The pandemic disrupted life, livelihoods, education and health like little else in recent history. The world found innovations and adaptations to minimise some of the disruptions for some people, but not all. Health care disruptions, less amenable to home-based solutions, ranged across a very broad continuum — a shift in health-seeking behaviour, limitations in health infrastructure, difficulties in outreach to community members, lack of availability of human resources and interruptions in supply chains. Not all of these were limited to the context of the pandemic — some have pre-existed but got magnified in the context of the pandemic.
Covid-19 saw health care workers diverted to the much-needed task of preventing and dealing with infections, taking them away from their regular tasks, and thus, further reducing the availability of health care workers. Health care facilities were deployed for testing and treating patients, but this made them unavailable for regular services. Supply chains were disrupted due to lockdowns. When health facilities were functioning, citizens were either fearful or unable to travel to them or were unaware that facilities were functioning. All this led to significant disruption in the provision of essential health services such as routine immunisation, testing and treating tuberculosis (TB) patients, maternal and child health care and nutrition-related interventions.
But India is no stranger to innovation. A few months into the pandemic, there were a variety of interventions, which sought to address some of these barriers related to health human resources, demand for and access to services, and provision to the last mile. Innovations were found in at least four categories — leveraging technology, leveraging community platforms, strengthening frontline workers and augmenting supply chains. Extensive interventions leveraged the digital platform such as remote counselling and consultation in several states; a child growth-monitoring app for remote monitoring of severely acute malnourished children in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh; an Interactive Voice Response System-based solution in Uttar Pradesh for reminder calls to the community about immunisation sessions; digital surveillance applications for front-line workers for TB and Covid-vulnerability assessment in states such as Gujarat, Kerala and Punjab for simultaneous TB and Covid assessment; an artificial intelligence-based diagnostics solution to scan chest X-rays and detect abnormalities.