Question

Private health services are lncreasing day- by- day but goverment medical services are not increasing?Why?​

Answer 1

Answer:

Public sector healthcare shall continue having its relevance for a long time in order to reach out healthcare to vast sections of underserved populations in developing countries like India. In the context that the 12th Five-Year Plan Document has rolled out an ambitious scheme to achieve “Universal Health Care” in the country, this review sets out the following objectives before itself:

(i) elucidate the more important challenges facing public hospitals in India and document their enormity;

(ii) understand the social, economic, and political sources/factors leading to the emergence of these challenges;

(iii) in accordance with the aforementioned analysis, propose solutions that are feasible within the present political and economic system.

For the purpose of this paper, a public hospital shall include the most peripheral PHC (primary health center) to a tertiary care hospital located in a big city. Even though there are differences in the specific functions of these institutions, they constitute a continuum of care, both preventive and curative. While the lower levels ought to provide more direct preventive and curative services for most of the common diseases, the higher level institutions are supposed to cater to a more selected set of patients who are in need for more specialized services not available at the lower public health facilities. Apart from this, the higher public health facilities have an obligation on providing supervision, training, and technical support to facilitate smoother functioning of the primary level facilities. It follows then that there is a synthesis across different levels of public hospitals and breakdown at any level has consequences for all levels.