CHENNAI: India ranks 112 in WHO ranking of health care systems in the world. “Above us, there is Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq and even Venezuela, where people don’t even have food to eat and sell their children for money.
Yet, we are so low,” said renowned cardiologist, Devi Shetty, founder and Chairman of Narayana Hrudalaya Health care chain.Shetty was speaking at a conclave conducted by the Association of Healthcare Providers (APHI), an organisation of private hospitals working towards improving healthcare and making it cheaper and more accessible to rural areas and those less privileged.
India needs 65 million surgeries per year, but only 26 million are conducted.The doctor said the main problem lay in the fact that MBBS doctors rarely go on to do their postgraduation and therefore fail to specialise in any particular field of medicine.
“If you don’t have a PG in this country, you cannot perform procedures like anaesthesia, cannot perform a caesarian or even an ultrasound, so in lots of rural hospitals, there might be a surgeon, but no anesthesiologist. MBBS students fall short of providing full care,” he said.
While USA has 20,000 seats for undergraduation, they have 40,000 seats for postgraduation because they encourage even experienced MBBS doctors to pursue specialisation. In India, though 63,985 seats are available for undergraduate students but only a mere 14,500 seats for post graduation.
Shetty cited the example of Maharashtra’s College of Physicians and Surgeons that offers diploma courses, “The State made it mandatory for MBBS doctors to enrol themselves in the college. This one move has brought down deaths in Maharashtra by drastic numbers in just four years since even the rural hospitals became more vibrant,” Shetty said.
Shetty firmly believes making post-graduate courses completely free will drastically improve the health care in the country, “In the rest of the world, post graduation in medicine is completely free. Here it costs crores, so students don’t opt for it,” he added.