India is in a very fortunate situation right now. A young, dynamic population and we have almost everything going for us. But if our country is to achieve its full potential then we must keep our people healthy. We people, the ones who live in cities, have access to excellent healthcare. Even for relatively minor issues like a common cold we have plenty of people to look after us. And even in the area of advanced medicine, the doctors and procedures available in our country are truly world class. But the situation in the rural areas is not so good.
To give you some numbers 700 million people live in 636,000 villages – this is a HUGE number but 66% of them do not have access to critical medicine. 31% of them travel more than 30kms to seek health care. But the fact remains that if we have the right set up in place, majority of the dominant diseases like diarrhoea, measles and typhoid are preventable and curable.
The problems in the field of rural healthcare are very diverse in character. To take a very simple example, some village do not like doctors because they wear white clothes because according to their beliefs, white cloth is used to wrap dead people and hence, they don’t feel very good about it. Some of the other current challenges are –
1) Healthcare resources in India are heavily biased toward the urban areas. The best facilities are concentrated in the cities and rural India has little or no access
2) The doctors to population ratio is 6 times lower in rural areas and the beds to population ratio lower by 15 times
3) 22 Million population pushed below poverty line annually due to healthcare expenditure alone
4) Villagers end up spending 1.5 times more compared to urban counterparts for same illness
5) 40% of hospitalization expenditure funded by borrowed money or sold asset
6) 7 out of 10 medicines in rural areas substandard or counterfeit
This makes things very difficult for the people living in rural India. Apart from these issues, the path to improving rural healthcare in India has numerous roadblocks. Rural healthcare isn’t financially attractive for the private sector and the private health system focuses on secondary and tertiary rather than primary healthcare. The public health is not well funded, under staffed and prone to corruption. The indigenous health system which is often marred by superstition needs supervision and guidance.
The next few years will be times of considerable stress on rural health care, but also times of great opportunity. Rural communities already have to respond to higher burdens of chronic disease, while dealing with workforce pressure and an aging clinic infrastructure. There is an urgent need to mobilize effort and creativity so as to ensure that rural Indians gain access to the care they need. The good news is that across the country there are already impressive examples of innovative new care models providing high-quality care, tailored to the distinctive needs of their local community. The challenge for all involved in rural India is now to build on this track record of innovation and self-reliance, so as to ensure that all Indians wherever they are — can live their lives to the fullest.
* This is an excerpt from the report presented by Team Parivartan of BITS Pilani Goa Campus at Bhagirath, Quark 2012. You can read the full report here -
PDF - http://www.4shared.com/office/sBS2eXF_/Rural_Healthcare_-_Team_Pariva.html
PPT - http://www.4shared.com/file/2Bc3r6Vs/Rural_Healthcare_-_Team_Pariva.html
