Sixth NFHS to begin in June

India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS) will launch its sixth round of fieldwork in June, with the results expected next year. The survey will assess progress in areas including health, demography and gender equity. The basic design and questions will remain the same as in previous rounds, with a small change being made in how anaemia is determined. A dietary survey is also planned, and questions will be included on the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana scheme. Previous rounds of the survey have influenced health policy in India.

Mumbai: Preliminary work for the sixth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) has begun, Dr Rajiv Bahl, secretary of department of health research and director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), announced.

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Bahl was presiding over the 64th convocation of the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) held on Saturday. Dr Indu Bhusan, former CEO of Ayushman Bharat- Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) and National Health Authority, was the chief guest at the event.

“The field survey will be launched in June, and by the next year we will have the results,” said professor KS James, director of the institute which conducts the study. “It will give an idea about the progress made over the last few years in various fields of demography, health, gender equity and more.”

The basic design and questions of the survey will continue to be the same as previous surveys. “A small change will be made in determining anaemia. ICMR is conducting a major study across the country to take venous blood samples instead of the capillary, because it is a better indicator of haemoglobin values,” Dr Bahl added. A dietary survey is also in the works, to be later incorporated in the NFHS survey.

Questions about the Ayushman Bharat-PMJAY, launched a short while before the previous survey in 2018, will also be asked. The standardisation is deliberate. “The strength of the survey is that each round is alike, so they can be compared,” he added.

The previous rounds of the survey have led to changes in health policies on ground. “Through NFHS-1, we found out only around 10 to 15%, a very small percentage of children were fully immunised, while the system counting the number of doses given showed a much higher number. That gave the impetus to improve immunisation coverage,” Bahl said. Similarly, the Janani Suraksha Yojana giving cash subsidies to those unable to afford deliveries at hospitals raised the fraction of institutional births from 40% to 90%. “We are now seeing a stagnation in childhood, malnutrition and stunting, so we are looking at what we do to change that.”

As per the last NFHS survey, childhood stunting increased from 21.3% to 37.2% in the suburbs and from 25.6% to 26.6% in Mumbai city. Childhood wasting, indicating severely low weight in children under 5 years of age, reached 7.2% in the suburbs and 9.1% in the city. The survey was conducted between 2019 and 2021, taking a longer duration due to the lockdown imposed by Covid-19.