The Congress party has already come out with its manifesto including right to health, which is one of the demands of NGOs and health experts, but the fraternity is pressing also for the inclusion of alternative ways for funding the hospitals for better health infrastructure and manpower in the country in the manifestos of those who are yet to come out with their charters.
The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, a non-governmental organisation in its “People’s Manifesto on Health” has said the right to health was a fundamental and universal right of all citizens which needs to be respected and realised within a time-frame as people across the country suffer and die unnecessarily due to poor access to affordable and effective healthcare.
The NGO which brings together grassroots health activists, civil society organisations and academic institutions from around the world said that the cost of healthcare was a leading cause of poverty.
In this context, it proposed a set of policy proposals which included 19 points designed to reverse the present situation in the health sector, and to “secure conditions of living and healthcare services that promote health in all its dimensions”.
Dr Devi Shetty, founder and chairman of Narayana Health felt that there was a need to look for alternative ways of funding healthcare, such as by a surcharge on mobile phone bills, bring down the cost of building hospitals, develop patient management software, and establish one or two health cities with 3,000 to 5,000 beds in each metro.
He pointed out that while the US has 19,000 undergraduate medical seats and 32,000 PG seats, in India it is the opposite — the country has close to 50,000 undergraduate medical seats but only 14,000 PG seats.
The low number of PG seats results in a shortage of specialists. This can have terrible consequences on the ground such as poor maternal and child health, he noted.
“Healthcare is basically disease management. We should build our system from the ground up to create a new blue-print of India’s healthcare,” said Dr Naresh Trehan, CMD, Global Health (Medicity), said.
“We have over 800,000 ASHAs (Accredited Social Healthcare Activists) in India, but they are ill-trained and don’t have any medical skills. Their costs are a huge burden on the exchequer and nothing gets accomplished in return. All we have to do is to upscale their skills so that they can be the eyes and ears of the healthcare system on the ground,” he added.