Abhinash Prabhakar
New Delhi, August 14 (IAS): As the second most populous country, India’s public healthcare sector presents both innovative challenges and opportunities for growth.
With a population of over 130 million, India’s main challenges are urban-rural inequalities, population disparities in access to healthcare, and an underfunded healthcare system.
Post-independence, India’s public health sector has suffered from low life expectancy, high infant mortality, women’s health care, limited access to adequate health care for rural populations, and lack of trained health care professionals. It has addressed multiple issues, including inequality in proportions.
However, India has made significant strides in several parameters, most importantly recent population control measures. The total fertility rate (TFR) (average number of children per woman) decreased from 2.2 to 2 at the national level.
According to the National Family Health Survey-5, India has only five states: Bihar (2.98), Meghalaya (2.91), Uttar Pradesh (2.35), Jharkhand (2.26) and Manipur (2.17). of 2.1.
Uma Kumar, Professor and Head of Department of Rheumatology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said today’s health indicators clearly demonstrate that significant achievements have been made in all parameters over the past 75 years. rice field.
But she continues, the country’s disease scenario is changing rapidly with changing lifestyles, increasing urbanization and increasing life expectancy.
“The prevalence of non-communicable diseases is increasing. But communicable diseases such as polio and leprosy are largely under control,” Kumar told IANS.
Talking about non-communicable diseases such as heart attacks, hypertension, diabetes and autoimmune diseases, she said important work needs to be done in these areas.
The government has done a commendable job to increase the number of medical institutions, but now it needs to pay attention to quality education, including improving teacher-student ratios, she added.
The National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) was conducted in a sample of approximately 6.37 million households from 707 districts and eight UTs in 28 states, covering 7,24,115 women and 1,01,839 men, Overall improvement implements the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in all states/UTs.
The extent to which married women typically participate in domestic decision-making indicates a higher participation in decision-making. We know that the difference between rural (77%) and urban (81%) is small.
Talking about the rural-urban divide from a post-independence health care perspective, Tarun Kumar, professor of cardiology at RML Hospital, faced health problems related to infectious and environmental diseases in his early days. But he said the situation is changing now.
As development begins to accelerate, villages begin to shrink, transportation systems advance and essential stores are replaced by malls, we will see a corresponding paradigm shift in various diseases, Kumar said. .
As the incidence of vector-borne diseases began to decline, lifestyle diseases increased sharply, he said.
“As time goes by, we are seeing more and more hypertension, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. We need to focus on disease,” Kumar said. Said.
In India, institutional births have increased significantly from 79% to 89%. Around 87% of births are also institutionalized in rural areas, compared to 94% in urban areas.
Fertility specialist Archna Dhawan Bajaj said women were dying of hypertension during pregnancy due to lack of proper medical infrastructure.
She added that there is a large urban-rural disparity in the country, with urban women having more access to health care resources than rural women.
In the post-independence era, a decline in the age of marriage has also helped improve women’s health.
“Easier access to medical resources due to the digitization of the healthcare ecosystem has also contributed to lower mortality rates. It’s still the most common place to work,’ Bajaj said.
