Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Health mission for urban citizens soon

CHENNAI: The Centre will shortly launch national health missions for urban citizens and schoolchildren on the lines of the successful National Rural Health Mission, Union Minister for Health Anbumani Ramadoss said on Thursday.

Addressing a session on ‘Health for All: Role of Diaspora’ at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas convention, he said the Centre was planning to scale up public healthcare and generate more health professionals to bridge the need-supply deficit. He felt that a deeper engagement of the Indian diaspora, either through investment or sharing of expertise, would complement the government’s efforts to broad-base quality healthcare.

Dr. Anbumani said the government was amending the regulations of the Medical Council of India to recognise postgraduate medical degrees of more countries as part of the efforts to encourage the return of qualified medical personnel to their homeland. At present, the 32,000 graduates and 13,000 postgraduates generated by 290 medical colleges were grossly insufficient, and the MCI only recognised medical degrees of a few English-speaking countries. “The plan is to extend recognition to degrees of non-English speaking countries, such as France and Germany, to encourage more qualified hands to return to the country.”

Other important plans included the rollout of clinical trial facilities, leveraging the cost advantage (launching a new molecule in the U.S. costs around $I billion against the $200 million in India), launching of health missions for children and urban citizens and establishing six tertiary care centres, on a par with the AIIMS, in Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh.

A state-of-the-art vaccine park and medical park was proposed at Chengalpattu to promote indigenous development of diagnostic equipment. The aim was to further bring down the healthcare cost, which was already among the lowest in the world, Dr. Anbumani said. The Centre would also constitute a Central Drugs Authority, on the lines of the Federal Drugs Administration in the U.S., to implement global standards in the pharmaceutical industry.

In his keynote address, Naresh Trehan, chairman, Global Health, said India would require an estimated 7.50 lakh hospital beds, 5 lakh doctors and 1 million nurses over the next decade.

Prathap C. Reddy, chief of Apollo Hospitals, who chaired the session, said the segment of 1.2 million medical professionals in the Indian diaspora had a critical role to play in assisting India’s efforts at bridging the gap between the need and the delivery in the healthcare sector. The country would require an additional one lakh beds and a massive scale-up of the number of medical, nursing and paramedical professionals.

Dr. Reddy also announced the launch of the Global Association of Physicians of Indian Origin.

Sanku S. Rao, president, American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, said Indian medical professionals in the U.S. numbered more than 45,000 and were willing to expand the scope of their engagement in India’s rural healthcare sector.

Ramesh Mehta, president, British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, underscored the need for addressing the poor-rich and urban-rural disparities in access to uniform healthcare standards. Rajni Kanabar, chairman, Regency Medical Centre, Tanzania, and Georgi Abraham, consultant, Madras Medical Mission, spoke.

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