Mumbai :
Healthcare industry leaders gathered in the city to discuss key issues plaguing the sector and to look for solutions to deal with them.
“Healthcare is basically disease management. We should build our system from the ground up to create a new blue-print of India’s healthcare. We have over 800,000 ASHAs (Accredited Social Healthcare Activists) in India but they lack medical skills. All we have to do is to upscale their skills so that they can be the eyes and ears of the healthcare system on the ground.” He added that ASHA volunteers will be a big help in ensuring quick diagnosis of diseases and reducing the incidence of non-communicable diseases.
Dr Devi Shetty, founder & chairman of Narayana Health spoke about the acute shortage of medical specialists in the country. “While the US has 19,000 undergraduate medical seats and 32,000 PG seats, in India it is the opposite – the country has close to 50,000 undergraduate medical seats but only 14,000 PG seats,” he said.
He added, “The low number of PG seats results in a shortage of specialists. This can have terrible consequences on the ground. For example, India has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and this is unrelated to the amount of money we spend on healthcare. The reason is that we have created a regulatory structure where only a specialist can perform certain tasks, and the country simply doesn’t produce enough of these specialists,” he said.
Shetty suggested that to tide over the problem, the country needs medical educational institutions on the line of the College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPS) in Maharashtra which would offer diploma courses in fields like anesthesia, gynecology, and pediatrics to medical graduates. “This can convert the entire 50,000 medical graduates produced in India every year into specialists who can then help reduce maternal mortality in India,” he added. “If we want to deliver better healthcare outcomes, India doesn’t require money. We only require policy changes. This will not happen till the Government looks at medical education as integral part of the country’s development.”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Mumbai / by Sumitra Deb Roy, TNN / March 29th, 2014