| Abstrakt: |
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted many activities across the country and the state of Kerala is not an exception. Although Kerala is frequently held up as an example for the rest of India in various social indicators. Despite Kerala's goal of lowering the maternal mortality rate to 30 it has increased to 66 in 2021, most likely due to COVID-19. This study investigated it. Data on key health service delivery to maternal and child health for all 24 months of the pre-COVID (2019-20) and COVID (2020-21) period were gathered from the HMIS, India, and the DHS, Kerala. For variables with normally distributed data, the paired sample t-test is performed and for variables with non-normally distributed data, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test is performed to compare the pre-covid and the covid period data of key health indicators of service delivery to mother and child healthcare. An Average Increasing Rate (AIR) or Average Reduction Rate (ARR) for the pre-covid period (2019-20) and the covid period (2020-21) has been calculated. The result shows that there is a significant impact of COVID-19 in full antenatal care, delivery care, child immunisation and maternal mortality albeit for a short period. When comparing full antenatal care during the COVID and pre-COVID periods, all services except the distribution of calcium tablets reveal a decline in service delivery. Because of having a high literacy rate, a solid health infrastructure, a proactive administration, and enough disaster management experience, the state mostly managed to deliver uninterrupted basic healthcare to its population and able to reduce the impact of COVID-19.However a more robust and dynamic healthcare system is required to be in place to mitigate the impact of these types of pandemics or any such kind of external shocks which are more frequent and enormous in scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
