The Indian healthcare sector: what ails the healers?

Abstract

The World Health Report 2006 - "Working together for health" contains an expert assessment of the current crisis in the global health workforce. WHO and many other health organizations have felt the need to address the issue of health at priority. The Health Care Sector of India faces serious challenges today. The basic resources providing health care viz. Health manpower, Expenditure and Infrastructure and time need attention. There are demand-supply issues, urban-rural divide, regionally skewed distribution of the opportunities of education, lack of higher education in sufficient numbers, migration of trained professional to other countries etc. Work is being done to address these issues but there is little evidence to suggest works being done to address the human resource perspective - understanding the practitioner's perspective on ways to tackle this challenge at any level. This study attempts to understand the Health Care Sector - its functions and the current state that it is in - in terms of the resources providing the services. The study focuses on the professional of this sector and identifies the following broad areas:1. The opportunity for higher education2. Availability of advanced Techniques, availability of faculty, administration etc3. Work and call schedule (A concern in some specialties)4. Employment policies and benefits The study summarizes the satisfaction level of the professional on these broad areas and makes recommendations to the official organs of the health care system to take lead in addressing the area of concerns. The study recommends to: Move towards continent of excellence and not islands of excellence - The view of medical services and training must be broadened. Like standardization of the post graduation degree and taking this to the community canters. A service is as good as the service provider -The general view of such continuous long work hours needs to be addressed either by increasing manpower or better by providing the basic facilities like clean drinking water etc. Human resource initiatives must be taken to ensure that the workforce is retained and motivated - both resident doctors and PG trainees.