Kolkata: In a major move to make primary healthcare in urban areas more robust, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday announced a package of financial incentives for the trained Honorary Health Workers (HHW) providing services in urban areas. The initiative comes when the Mamata Banerjee government has taken a series of steps in creating all necessary infrastructure across the state to fight against the deadly pandemic. The move has been taken as the state government gives equal significance to better care of pregnant women and infants along with immunisation and also to ensure drives for the elimination of tuberculosis and other such diseases besides going all guns blazing to ensure the safety of the masses from COVID-19. In a tweet on Sunday, the Chief Minister stated: "As part of our continued efforts to make primary healthcare in urban areas more robust, I, on behalf of the Government of West Bengal, am pleased to introduce a package of financial incentives for the trained Honorary Health Workers (HHW) providing services in urban areas." With the initiative taken by the state government, around 65,00 health workers will be pursuing special training to take care of pregnant women and infants as well as immunisation through door-to-door visits. She further stated in the tweet: "These HHWs will be specially trained so as to further intensify our focus on the care of pregnant women, infants, immunisation, elimination of TB and other such diseases through household visits. Around 6,500 HHWs will be benefitted by this initiative starting July 1, 2020." In April, the state government had directed all districts to ensure "timely transportation" of "biological samples" of "presumptive tuberculosis (TB) patients" without any delay to laboratories during COVID-19 lockdown situation. The measure was taken considering that the communicable disease is "one of the top 10 causes of death" in the country and the situation should not worsen in this regard when vehicular movement in public and private sector has been reduced to a bare minimum during the lockdown period.

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