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In India, there is one government allopathic doctor for every 10,189 people,
one government hospital bed for every 2,046 people and one state-run
hospital for every 90,343 people.
You don’t need an epidemic, however predictable, for the public health
system to collapse. It is a matter of routine that patients share beds and
doctors are overworked.
India has a little over one million modern medicine (allopathy) doctors to
treat its population of 1.3 billion people. Of these, only around 10% work in
the public health sector, shows data from the National Health Profile 2017.
The shortage of health providers and infrastructure is the most acute in rural
areas, where catastrophic health expenses push populations the size of United
Kingdom into poverty each year.
Add apathy and you have bodies of the dead being mutilated by dogs in
hospital morgues, people carrying home the their dead children because the
hospital refused them a hearse, and tragedies like the hundreds of infant
deaths in Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College every year.
BRD Medical College Hospital’s failure to save lives points to a systemic rot
in public healthcare delivery, which is saddled with problems of
mismanagement and inadequate resources — infrastructure and human.
Read Part 1 of series | Gorakhpur deaths: Why India’s poor public health
delivery system is a killer
This brings us to critical questions: Can such deaths be prevented? How can
India’s public health system deliver quality care? Will public hospitals just
end up being places where the sick go to die?
India doesn’t have enough hospitals, doctors, nurses and health workers, and
since health is a state subject, disparities and inequities in the quality of care
and access to health varies widely not just between states but also between
urban and rural areas.
For example, Maharashtra has 1,53,513 registered doctors, the most in the
country, compared to 792 registered with the Arunachal Pradesh Medical
Council.
Infrastructure
Modern medicine (allopathy)
“There are no large-scale surveys on quackery by national statistical agencies
such as the Census of India or National Sample survey Office, which could
form the basis for policy making in this area. The World Health Organization
is the first comprehensive report on the health workforce in India and though
it has been derived by decoding the 2001 Census data, the methodology and
conclusions are sound,” said Shailaja Chandra, former chief secretary Delhi,
who has worked in the Union health ministry and authored the
report, Unqualified Medical Practitioners this year.
“The lack of medical qualifications was particularly high in rural areas. The
report brought out that whereas 58% of the doctors in urban areas had a
medical degree, only 19% of those in rural areas had such a qualification,”
said Chandra.
Training informal healthcare workers who had little-to-no training for nine
months increased their ability to correctly manage cases, found a J-PAL 2016
study on The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India.
Trained informal workers provided correct case management in 60% cases
compared to 52% of the comparison group, and 67% doctors at public health
centres. The training, however, did not reduce the use of unnecessary
medicines, found the study.
Trained quacks, however, cannot replace doctors, and India is just not
training enough. There are 462 medical colleges that teach 56,748 doctors
and 3,123 institutions that prepare 1,25,764 nurses each year, but with India’s
population increasing annually by 26 million, the numbers are too little.
“India keeps announcing new AIIMS-like institutes in states, but where is the
faculty to train these doctors? Setting up a building and buying equipment is
not enough, you need trained doctors to provide care,” said Rao.
Medical education
Source: National Health Profile 2017, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Even the equipment bought is often not used. A Comptroller and Auditor
General (CAG) report in June revealed a 27.21% shortage for clinical
equipment and 56.33% for non-clinical equipment, of which oxygen supply
is a part. The report found critical medical equipment had not been used for
more than five years because there was no annual maintenance contract.