Improving quality of pediatric care in India a call for action.

India has made a significant progress in the reduction of annual under five child deaths in the last few years. However, the absolute number of annual child deaths still remains high and achieving Millennium Development Goal 4 for India may not be possible at the currentrate of child mortality reduction. The deaths due to the easily preventable and treatable causes indicate that either health services are not being made available or are ineffective (poor quality) or the people are not using these services (perceived poor quality) or any combination of these factors. A few studies from India have revealed that many sick children are not taken to health providers and those taken to providers, only a proportion of them are properly assessed and treated by these healthcare providers, and that their parents are poorly advised [1-2]. These findings raise a few questions about the quality of already scarce and inequitable child healthcare services in the country. The evidence are increasingly accumulating that the access to poor quality providers leads to child morbidity and mortality [3].