Developing countries like India are plagued with several problems including poverty, malnutrition and a colossal disease burden, all of which are connected in a vicious circle—poverty leading to malnutrition, leading to illness.
The lack of emphasis on pre-emptive healthcare combined with low health awareness and education ponder on India’s health indicators.
Affordable innovation is the future, and India is having a unique prospect to provide it to global markets by building quality across the innovation chain from discovery to product advancement.
Associations need to be established between health research and national health programmes to build on to the kind of innovation happening and guarantee research findings are applied in decision making in public health.
India needs to boost research in relevant areas, to make sure drug innovation and discovery is consistently happening.
Challenges within Indian healthcare system:
The wide inconsistency in quality of healthcare facilities in public and private sector as regulatory criteria are neither established nor applied properly.
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The concern of quacks and old-fashioned healers treating patients at the grass root level is a serious worry. This is because of the poor availability of healthcare services in rural areas.
The non-affordability of healthcare services is a major dilemma with the majority of the country’s population. As a result, they are impoverished because of high out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures. They also suffer the adverse level of the poor quality of care.
What could be done to create an accessible and affordable healthcare delivery model?
Keep the focus on population ‘at risk’ for non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, and hypertension.
Planning a systematic policy for monitoring industrial health diseases and outlining the concept of occupational health physicians and nurses by setting up higher education for the awareness and development in the field
Creating a provision in the form of units within the industrial set-ups to identify health-related diseases at an early stage
Provision for mass coverage for endemic diseases
Announcing prevention-based health checkups at government hospitals and moving on to private sectors as a mandate.
Launching a pre-designed and well-organised system in rural areas, to provide basic services and knowledge of primary healthcare.
Communication is a key skill to be instilled among young experts who will be the future leaders within the healthcare industry.
(Writer is Dr Rajendra Patankar, Chief operating officer, Nanavati Super Speciality Hospital.Views expressed are a personal opinion.)
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