Does health financial resource correlate with physical health infrastructure?

ABSTRACT

Background: Is building physical health infrastructure (PHI) a priority for state governments within the northeastern states (NES) of India? The decentralization mechanism initiated by the government of India to synergize health care across states seems highly unequal. Certain Indian states such as Kerala, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh have achieved phenomenal progress in the health-care system through a decentralized mechanism. Objectives: The study attempts to examine the PHI of NES and public health resources. Methods: The study has employed the Euclidian Distant Method (EDM) which fulfills various compulsive and instinctive properties; specifically, normalization, symmetry, monotonicity, proximity, uniformity, and signaling inclusively. This method ranks the states in terms of infrastructure availability and public health resources. Second, the correlation was done to see the relationship between the PHI of NES and public health resources. Results: The results of the EDM show that Arunachal Pradesh ranked the highest in the Index of Public Health Infrastructure, whereas Assam ranked the lowest. The Index of Public Health Resource shows interesting results. Assam has remained at the lowest rank and inconsistency of ranks among the other NES. The correlation between the indices is positive, yet not encouraging. Conclusion: This implies that building up health infrastructure and responding to the demand for health-care infrastructure still stands ignored and rather remained stagnant.