|
Education Plus
DIL SE
For a healthy India
ARUN GAUTHAM
BURNING ISSUES: Providing optimum health for all calls for a collective effort from various agencies.
Andhra Medical College: The thick blanket of fog obscured the visibility in the appallingly silent reading room that frosty winter morning.
Buried in a heap of books, to grapple with internal exams, I could not make out the person behind the abrupt outburst of cacophonous pleads from the distant entrance of the hall.
The troubled voice was instantly calmed by a couple of coins from the library secretary and such anecdotes of crying destitute have become a regular feature in the precincts of the college. As I later realised, they were not mendicants but few patients who suffer not just physical but also economic distress and it is the latter that must be tackled to achieve wholesome health in the nation.
As the clock strikes 9 at the central tower, the hospital turns busy with medicos in immaculate white, doctors with stethoscopes, ward boys with rusted stretchers and also often with some patients who seek alms from the affluent ones.
If one struggles in a tribal dialect, another gestures from dilapidated corners.
If one requests contribution in the name of God, another asks for transport charges back home.
Some of them abandon free surgeries incapable of buying blood and few others quit a poison case in the middle, lest they should be mired in legal wrangles.
A quintessential visitor will, with perspicacity, infer that patients to government hospitals suffer from pathologies which health sector alone can do little to solve.
For, a typical rural villager, there are meagre resources to consume nutritious food and hence falls prey to deficiency problems.
Shackles of poverty are too strong to seek medical help and the daily wage is too essential to sacrifice for a hospital visit.
Another unpalatable tragedy that has dawned upon us is the lack of funds for the health sector.
Our country spends only 0.89% of the total GDP that is abysmally low for a skyrocketing economy.
Many villages in India have to wait for weeks to see a doctor and have understaffed dispensaries without essential paraphernalia.
There are hamlets where inaccessibility deprives them of vaccines and life saving anti-malaria drugs. Central hospitals have shortage of beds with patients grappling for one, a common sight.
Clinic born infections, late recovery, mothers dying during labour, delay in x-ray reports, reluctance to admit in-patients, postponement of essential surgeries, inability to handle all bodies in mortuaries are all due to lack of adequate finances for medical care.
Truth remains that optimum health for every citizen is not the task of health sector alone, as some presume.
Umpteen disciplines of agriculture, housing, transport, social welfare, HRD must function with perfect synchrony to achieve it.
The onus on the system therefore is to attain economic uplift and food security for the one billion population.
Today we are proud of scientific advances and many millionaires, but we cannot be glad regarding the pandemics and hunger deaths that are making headlines.
The eleventh five year plan has been virtuously declared with high priority to health and it is high time that the recommended allocation of 4% of GDP is provided.
It’s time to act with discernment and proper preferences for the tale of disease to be relegated to the chronicles of time.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
|
