critically appreciate the health policy issues with reference to the recent periodic plan.
long question
Answers
Explanation:
Lack of infrastructure
India has been struggling with deficient infrastructure in the form of lack of well-equipped medical institutes for quite a while now. To add to it, the rate of building such medical teaching or training facilities remains less as compared to the need of the hour.
For a considerable time, the government regulation mandated that private medical colleges must be built on at least five acres of land. As a result, quite a few private colleges were built in rural areas, where it became quite difficult to recruit adequately qualified, full-time doctors due to lack of proper living conditions, besides low pay scales.
It is only now that the newly-constituted National Medical Commission (NMC) has put forward the idea to do away with the requirement of minimum five acres of land for setting up a medical college.
Further, the commission has proposed to curtail the minimum number of beds required as a proportion of the number of seats in the college.
In addition, the new regulations have also laid down the requirements for lecture theatres, libraries, laboratories, minimum bed requirement of the attached medical college, and location of faculty offices and accommodation of students.
Shortage of efficient and trained manpower
One of the most pressing problems in India remains a severe shortage of trained manpower in the medical stream, this includes doctors, nurses, paramedics and primary healthcare workers. The situation remains worrisome in rural areas, where almost 66 per cent of India’s population resides.
The doctor-to-patient ratio remains abysmally low, which is merely 0.7 doctors per 1,000 people. This is compared to the World Health Organisation (WHO) average of 2.5 doctors per 1,000 people. Improving this situation continues to remain a long-term process.
The issue can be suitably addressed by increasing the capacity of existing teaching and training institutes while adding new ones in the long run.
Unmanageable patient-load
Even prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare facilities had been feeling the strain due to unmanageable patient-load. Moreover, serving a population of 1.4 billion remains a Herculean task in itself when it comes to suitably managing healthcare facilities.
There is a need to adopt technology wherever possible to streamline the operational and clinical processes for healthcare facilities in order to manage efficient patient flow. In addition, there is the challenge to think beyond the obvious and promote virtual care protocols, and telehealth services, which can be leveraged to reduce the patient-load burden to a large extent.