The effort should be made to conduct more tests, and there should be a systematic treatment for the Covid-19, said Dr Prathap C Reddy, founder-chairman of Apollo Hospitals, in a conversation with Prabhu Chawla, Editorial Director, The New Indian Express and author and senior journalist Kaveree Bamzai on TNIE’s Expressions, a series of live webcasts with people who matter.
Do you think our focus on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) has led to this situation?
Also, currently, patient with other conditions are not getting attention... It was anticipated that the second decade will see NCDs grow enormously. 80 per cent of the deaths will be from the NCDs... The World Economic Forum said the cost burden for the world will be 30 trillion dollars and 4 trillion dollars for India. If you control NCDs, the advantage is there will be GDP growth. The stress should be on NCDs as they are all preventable.
The allegation is that the private sector is becoming very expensive.
Hospitals — primary, secondary and tertiary — all have a certain amount of additional infrastructure and expenditure. Some states have fixed a charge when it comes to Covid-19 for room care and ICU. But they have forgotten the majority of the patients in the ICU has co-morbidities, and they have to be treated for these, too. That is an additional expense.
Why are more private hospitals not adopting villages?
It’s not that people are not doing. They are doing charitable work. As technology started coming in, they found it difficult to fund technology and fund that.
What kind of support do you expect from the government?
The scenario in healthcare is going to be post-Covid-19. The individual must be taught what is good healthcare. This decade has given us a huge advantage in healthcare to make a diagnosis and correct them. In India, we could reverse NCDs in a majority of cases. We need to double our number of doctors, triple the number of nurses and quadruple the number of paramedics. They also have to increase the number of colleges.
There is a theory that you don’t need more medical colleges. Do you agree?
We need more beds but for training, we need much more. The huge advantage in training in India can use them.
What is the future of home delivery of healthcare?
The future is immense.Telemedicine advice has great progress.
Have we reached the peak of Covid-19?
Unless a vaccine comes, we can never fight the disease. In India, our problem is the people who are travelling without knowing they have the disease.
Do you think the migrant crisis could have been handled better?
The lockdown did not help the migrants. It aggravated their problem.