Incentives could help delivery of essential health services by frontline workers, study finds

Offering incentives and supporting frontline workers in record keeping could help to improve the delivery of essential health interventions, a study carried out in Bihar, India, has found.

Each year about 3.1 million children under 5 worldwide die due to undernutrition. These deaths could be reduced by about 15% if there was 90% coverage of essential health and nutrition interventions, including immunisation information and services, general nutrition information, food supplements, and pregnancy care information. In India these interventions are primarily delivered through home visits or at special health centres by the Integrated Child Development Services and the National Rural Health Mission.

The study used data from 6000 randomly selected, eligible households across …