District Health Society (DHS)

On the lines of the State Health Mission, every district will have a District Health Mission headed by the Chairperson, Zila Parishad. It will have the District Collector as the Co-Chair and Chief Medical Officer as the Mission Director.
To support the District Health Mission, every district will have an integrated District Health Society (DHS) and all the existing societies as vertical support structures for different national and state health programmes will be merged in the DHS. The DHS will be responsible for planning and managing all health and family welfare programmes in the district, both in the rural as well as urban areas. There are two important implications of this requirement. Firstly, DHSs planning will have to take note of both treasury and non-treasury sources of funds, even though it may not be handling all sources directly. Secondly, its geographical jurisdiction will be greater than those of the Zilla Parishad and /or Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in the district

Ensuring Inter-sectoral convergence and integrated planning should be a specific task for the Governing Body of the DHS. However, the DHS is not meant to take over the executive functions of the ZP / ULBs and/or the district health administration. On the contrary, DHS is meant to provide the platform where the three arms of governance ZP, ULBs and district health administration and district programme managers of NHM sectors get together to decide on health issues of the district and delineate their mutual roles and responsibilities.
The DHS may also be viewed as an addition to the district administrations capacity, particularly for planning, budgeting and budget analysis, development of operational policy proposals, and financial management etc. Because it is a legal entity, the DHS can set up its own office which has adequate contingent of staff and experts and can evolve its own rules and procedures for hiring the staff and experts both from the open market as well as on deputation from the Government.
In other words, the DHS is not an implementing agency; it is a facilitating mechanism for the district health administration as also the mechanism for joint planning by NHM related sectors.