India
India launches major government-private health initiative
By IANS
Mar 28, 2006, 21:00

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday launched a major public-private health initiative that would involve imparting specialised and sustained training of health care professionals and workers with the aim of making India a "global destination for cheap and high quality health care".

Called the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), the venture aims at training in multi-disciplinary knowledge through a network of public health schools to improve services, revitalise existing institutions and introduce greater levels of expertise.

While public sector health care is found woefully lacking, private sector efforts are also wanting, the prime minister said while launching the initiative in the company of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

"Regrettably, on the whole, the record of the private sector in health care provisioning in India has not been very good even though it is the dominant source of health care provisioning," regretted Manmohan Singh.

"We are all familiar with reports of unethical practices, including commissions given in return for referral and diagnostic work. We must have appropriate measures to tackle this."

In a critical appraisal of the health system in the country, the prime minister expressed concern over the skewed distribution of specialisations among doctors.

"There is a severe shortage of trained public health professionals with broad based multidisciplinary knowledge of the determinants of health. Such deficiencies are more acute within our public health services sector, and this generates a more severe impact than deficiencies in clinical medicine," he said.

He said the PHFI would help impart training to equip health professionals with expertise and managerial skills to design and deliver programmes at the national level and down to the village level.

"Apart from the lacunae, there is also the realm of future opportunities. India faces the possibility of becoming a global destination for cheap and high quality health care. The demographic contrast between a young India and an ageing world gives us an opportunity to train professionals at different levels to meet the needs of the emerging global care industry.

"These issues have not come on the policy radar because of the absence of institutions like public health schools which would have tracked such issues. I look forward to your public health schools helping us bridge this gap by training people who can in turn build capacities at middle and senior management levels in the Indian health system."

Stating a desire to develop an Indian agenda both in academics and research, Manmohan Singh said currently many tropical diseases were under-researched.

He expressed hope that the PHFI, "by harnessing the best technical expertise from all over the world, would break new ground in the management of tropical diseases.

"A research agenda that responds to the Indian situation would also emerge."

He urged PHFI to invest in capacity building in existing public health institutions across the country, to fulfil the need "to revitalise and strengthen departments of social and preventive medicine in our medical colleges".

He cited the examples of Dr. Devi Shetty's hospitals in Bangalore and Dr V. Shantha's Cancer Institute in Chennai and urged state governments to partner such private ventures to "introduce greater levels of expertise into their public health system".

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