Facility based IMNCI.

India has the world's greatest burden of neonatal and under- five mortality. In 2008, approximately 1.8 million under five children, including 1 million neonates, died. At the current rate of progress, India will not be able to achieve the MDG 4 target of reduction of under- five mortality to 38 per 1,000 live births by 2015. The Reproductive and Child Health programme (RCH) II under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) comprehensively integrates interventions that improve child health and addresses factors contributing to infant and under-five mortality. Under the RCH II National Programme-Implementation Plan, IMNCI approach is the major instrument of newborn and child health strategy. IMNCI clinical guidelines focus on assessment, classification and providing treatment according to disease severity. Severe illnesses (red classification) require urgent referral after pre-referral treatment. Further diagnosis and management is dependent on the skills of health workers of the referral hospital. Therefore, capacity building of professionals for providing optimum care for sick children in referral units is an obvious path to optimize the benefits of IMNCI on child survival. With these objectives, F-IMNCI (Facility based IMNCI) package was developed by a committee of experts constituted by the Ministry of Health and Family welfare, Government of India.