These days there is a genuine cry regarding the faulty health care system in J&K? Just in the recent past children in thousands would die of measles, mumps, diarrhea, and small pox, or even polio. Mothers would die of normal deliveries too. It is because of the untiring efforts of our health care providers that such diseases have been controlled. But improving the health care system globally is an ongoing process and to keep pace with rest of the world our state needs to gear up.
The first thing to do is to plan our health care system according to our needs and resources. We need to avoid the politically motivated short cuts and refrain from copying the countries with unlimited resources. In doing so we must involve experts in formulating an indigenous health policy keeping in view that we are having Indian medicine too in vogue. In the long run it will be dangerous to overlap the two. So the two systems should run strictly under two different roofs each practicing its own method leaving the choice of treatment to the patient. At the same time we must develop a planned health care system in private sector for our affluent class.
All of us know population has increased tremendously. With the result it has become an ordeal for a critically sick common man to reach to the nearest medical facility that is why large chunks of our population remain unattended. We need to understand a few basic things regarding our health care. Our community will have to work hand in glove with the delivery system of our health care providers through a proper and constructive feedback. The first thing that needs to be introduced is the preventive medicine and life style medicine to make a good health affordable for a common man. All of us know hypertension endocrine diseases and malignancies have increased tremendously all over the state. It is here that government needs to take advice of our experts of preventive medicine that will educate people through electronic and print media regarding dos and don’ts for a good health.
We must have dieticians, physiotherapists and dentists in all our hospitals and health centers that will impart training regarding dietary knowledge exercise and orodental hygiene for the ignorant masses. Most of our rural population can afford a kitchen garden to grow fresh vegetables for domestic consumption and some livestock for its manure. Let us not dump our lands with too many chemical fertilizers that contribute to lots of diseases. Clean drinking water is the duty of a democratic government so are the unadulterated foods.
The curative medicine or the modern allopathic medicine has expanded a lot in the recent years. With advances in the field of science and technology the number and quality of elaborate tests that need sophisticated gadgets has increased manifold. All these procedures need lot of resources and expertise hence becomes unaffordable for the common masses. It is here the skill and expertise of a well trained doctor is called for to decide the need of the required tests to avoid the commercialization of his knowledge and profession. A good doctor will always depend on the art of history taking, an elaborate clinical examination and will always be equipped with his basic tools like a thermometer a hammer and a B.P apparatus. It will be disastrous to equip our hospitals and health centers with sophisticated gadgets unless we have qualified people to use these machines and biomedical engineers to keep these in order.
Let us talk about some basic issues that make our health care system look shabby. No doubt we have constructed buildings for health centers; sub district hospitals, district hospitals and trauma hospitals all around the state but you can’t call these buildings as hospitals unless you have the required man power and other facilities over there. It is no fun to keep a surgeon or a physician and a gynecologist in a peripheral hospital without other required support services. To the best of my knowledge these experts never reside at these places for want of support services and the scare of getting manhandled by miscreants. Well trained assistant surgeons could manage these places better with a good referral and ambulatory services and the services of the specialists thus spared could be utilized in a better way at central places where we have acute shortages. Keeping in view the mountainous topography plus the miserable road connectivity government needs to consider chopper air ambulances that may work cheaper for our critically sick patients. We must try to post local doctors and paramedics making it mandatory for them to work in their localities once they get admissions on the basis of backward areas or backward classes. Others too should rotate periodically to avoid favoritism or nepotism. In order to do so you need a political will and a vision. Let me once again emphasize we are a state with limited resources and we must cut our coat according to the cloth. A further step towards ‘health for all’ we need to introduce health insurance for everybody. We may start with group insurance that will be cheaper and affordable besides that we must introduce generic medication at the earliest to make the doctor’s prescription cost effective for our patients.
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Lastupdate on : Wed, 4 Jul 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 4 Jul 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 5 Jul 2012 00:00:00 IST