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Management of COVID-19 pandemic in India – An ICMR perspective

The pandemic of COVID-19 has put the world under tremendous challenges of public health crisis. For disease management, entire world is facing unique challenges and governments out there are attempting to address those challenges in their best possible ways. Majorly, the challenges are associated with the uncertainties to provide financial support to the national health programs, or introducing flexible policies to facilitate innovations for the availability, affordability, and accessibility of healthcare products. Amongst these, one of the challenges with the management of the COVID-19 disease was its detection in the human body that required sensitive and accurate diagnostic tests and availability of suitable infrastructure to make them accessible in remote healthcare settings as well.

Since WHO declared COVID-19 a world health emergency in January 2020, the country was in urgent need to procure the required diagnostic tests in order to maintain equilibrium between increasing demand and supply side. Maintenance of equilibrium between demand and supply side is not an easy task; rather it demands collaborative efforts among all stakeholders that include government, academia, R&D institutions, public/private healthcare providers, public/private healthcare suppliers, testing centers/labs, etc., in order to protect the healthcare system of the country from becoming overwhelmed.

The existing healthcare system in India is characterized by the context-specific challenges, associated with underperformance of healthcare settings, inadequate healthcare supplies, and high import-dependency on technologically advanced products. These context-specific challenges are contributing to the factors like inaccessible and unaffordable healthcare to a large proportion of the country’s population. In such a scenario, the process of procurement of diagnostics for the management of COVID-19 pandemic became very complex and its success rate was totally dependent on the efficacy of the system, within which the procurement process was taking place.

During this, country’s leading medical research agency Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has emerged as a forefront agency in development of a completely dynamic system for the procurement of COVID-19 diagnostic kits and equipment since the disease outbreak.

ICMR’s experience of more than 100 years in medical research and the systems’ features that have enabled it to come forward as forefront agency in the country during the pandemic were: (i) ICMR’s mission to work toward the country’s specific need-based innovations; (ii) Its competence in viral research and development in the form of having a dedicated institutional set-up for viral research, called National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune; (iii) Establishment of Network of viral diagnostic laboratories (VRDLs) pan India; (iv) past experience of handling and management of the outbreak of NIPAH and ZIKA virus; (v) promotion of collaborative research efforts both inter-institutional and intra-institutional during the pandemic; ICMR has effectively collaborated with Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and fostered the collaborative research between ICMR’s 26 laboratories across India, effective linkages between VRDLs network with medical colleges, state health services, and other ministries, which has significantly played a pivotal role in the management of the pandemic in the country; (vi) Tremendous efforts by the ICMR in providing handholding to domestic firms on day-to-day basis that has given the opportunity of learning by doing to the firms, and made the country self-reliant on the domestic diagnostic products within 6 months of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Hence, ICMR being a leading medical research agency in the country, has delivered a responsible and effective role in the management of COVID-19 through its system-based approach.

The approach has emerged out of collective efforts from all concerned stakeholders involved in the pandemic management, and helped the nation in dealing with the pandemic challenge in the best possible way.

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