Actually, ‘health’ is not new phenomena but yes new word in our dictionary that is highlighted nowadays due to this Pandemic since 2020 March, which was a horrible year for all of us. Every day we have heard that so many cases have an impact on health as well death ratio has been increasing but are they the only reason behind the virus? Nah! You are reading the right affirmation that my answer is absolutely not! Why is it that our health infrastructure has not developed yet Post Independence and we are talking about “New India and New Bharat.” Without healthy people how we can say we are the “New India” concept?
Union Health Coverage can be defined as ensuring equitable access for all Indian citizens to quality health care which encompasses promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative care.
Let’s have a look at our health infrastructure:
In India, public and private hospitals are available but still due to the lack of facilities of the ventilator, ICU beds and oxygen unavailability, so many deaths have been happened. In present-day why because of ignorance of our Government of India, they do not give so much attention to the public health care system. Why we are not taking a lesson from last year- we have enough resources to tackle this situation but because of other concerns, we are still behind other countries.
According to the World Bank, ” India has 85.7 physicians per 1 Lakh people in 2017, 53 Beds per 1 Lakh people and 172 nurses and midwives per 1 lakh people”. Is this data sufficient to understand our health infrastructure? And in the present scenario, you know very well that it is not! So why is it this way?
Health is dependent on 4As that is Availability, Accessibility, Affordability and Accountability. Lack of availability in the rural area as well as city also. In this pandemic, we have seen that how our public and private hospitals failed to give basic health support to critical patients and we are unable to access a good health system due to no availability.
I have not criticised the system but we have full rights to have good health and this will be possible by good management. The Government needs to increase our budget expenditure on health infrastructure. Also, health is a state subject that is mentioned in our constitution so State Government should work on this. The major contribution needs to be done by the centre and the state as well. Ayushman Bharat scheme and National health programme need to be implemented in the local area and inter stare variation requirement.
More transport system to reach hospitals in rural and also use Artificial Intelligence like telemedicine in rural areas so they can directly contact a physician from anywhere. Also, data available on site with ICU beds and other medical-related data should be available on the mobile app. Government should advertise generic medicine facility and also need to be open branches everywhere so medicine can available at a regenerable price. We should follow the Kerala model for the health system better in the state.
Need to be more concerned about public health infrastructure and most important need to be built trust on people between the hospital and the public. Every failure in life teaches us that how to be improved in our next steps but after post-independent, it took long life to understand but still we are unable to understand.
The New India concept is still undefined. I am sure next time I will get an answer on this.