ASTANA. February 13. KAZINFORM Delivering his annual Address to the Nation President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev emphasized that the main direction of development of human capital was an increase of availability and quality of medical care, promotion of healthy life style. The Salamatty Kazakhstan Program, which is implemented now on the instruction of the President, is aimed at quality development of healthcare system in the country, according to the Kazakh Prime Minister's website http://pm.kz/

The National Screening Program was launched in 2011 as one of the directions of the Salamatty Kazakhstan Program. Thus, a number of programs on monitoring of the state of health of target groups of the population were launched in the country.

The screening programs were expanded in 2011 within the framework of this Program and aimed at detection of cardiovascular diseases, cervical cancer, diabetes mellitus, glaucoma, congenital and hereditary diseases of hearing of children, hepatitis 'A' and 'B' at early stage among the target risk groups.

'We continued the work on improvement of medical services. The list of guaranteed volume of free medical care was significantly expanded. Treatment of hepatitis 'B' and 'C' was included into the list, screening tests, socially psychological consultation, in vitro fertilization were added as well,' Prime Minister of the country Karim Massimov said earlier.

In accordance with the information of the Ministry of Healthcare of Kazakhstan, more than 7 million people underwent screening tests in the year of pilot implementation of the Salamatty Kazakhstan Program.

'Over 7 million people were embraced with screening tests in 2011 and 1.2 people were diagnosed with different diseases and more than 600 thousand people underwent timely treatment,' Minister of Healthcare of Kazakhstan Salidat Kairbekova said.

Besides, the efforts of healthcare workers of the country are aimed at systematic struggling against maternal and infant mortality. 1 million 20 thousand women were examined within prophylactic tests in 2011 and 4 million 200 thousand children in 2011. Complex measures that were taken in 2011 allowed to reduce maternal mortality 1.5 times and infant mortality - by 9.9%.

Moreover, the accent on early detection of malignant neoplasms by means of holding prophylactic examinations among target risk groups and use progressive methods of diagnoses and treatment was made in order to improve the oncological services.

Thanks to these measures, there is a tendency for reduction of mortality from malignant neoplasms at the level of 8.3% against 99.9 in 2011 and 108.9 per 100 thousand people in 2010.

The screening tests that are held within the framework of the Salamatty Kazakhstan Program are the fundamental principles of detection of diseases at early stages. The international experience shows that introduction of long term screening programs for around 15-20 year allow to achieve reduction of mortality from diseases almost twofold.