Inter-District Disparities in Health in Haryana

In this research paper, an attempt was made to assess the extent of inter-district disparities in Haryana in terms of health indicators. The health status was measured by various indicators covering three aspects of health, that is, health outcome, health infrastructure, and access to and uses of health facilities. The paper found wide inter-district disparities in various health indicators. The range and standard deviation of various health indicators clearly showed wide dispersion in health indicators. The extraction of factor scores and their district-wise ranking revealed some interesting results. Some of the districts scored very low on health infrastructure, but scored very high on access to and uses of health facilities. This indicated that either the residents of these districts were making better use of available public health facilities, or they were availing private health facilities. Again, it was observed that some districts that scored high on health infrastructure performed poorly on uses of health facilities. This indicated that the public, at large, was not availing the available public health infrastructure. The reason could either be the attitudes of the public health staff or inhibiting cultural factors. Hence, it can be concluded that having public infrastructure in place does not ensure proper maternal and child health care; the emphasis should be on their proper and efficient uses.