There are a lot of issues that needs focus in the New Health Policy.
Some of them are:
- Government should increase health expenditure to three per cent of GDP
- Strengthen the public healthcare system
- Resolve manpower challenges by:
- Increasing salary of government doctors serving rural areas
- Children of rural doctors should be given priority in school admissions
- Special rebates for essential commodities (like army)
- Canteen for doctors, like the army canteen
- Increase salaries of nurses, especially those serving in rural areas
Other recommendations include:
- Upgrading nurses to nurse practitioner
- The ratio of undergraduate to post graduate seats should be 1: 1
- Improving infrastructure
- Fund allocation to improve the facilities at government hospitals
- Strengthen PHCs, taluk and district hospitals
- Increase the pool of generalists/family physicians to reduce healthcare costs and increase health efficiency
- Increase emphasis on preventive and promotive healthcare
- High priority for geriatric care
- Strengthen political will and increase allocation of government resources
- Expand geriatrics knowledge base and enhance geriatrics competencies from grassroots to tertiary level
- Developing human resources for the healthcare of the elderly should be taken up on war footing. With immediate effect, every effort should be made to include geriatrics as a separate subject in medical, nursing, social work and psychology curricula.
- Creating a pool of health personnel trained in geriatric care at certificate, diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels would be critical to providing geriatric services at the primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare levels.
- Awareness creation on elderly on a massive national scale
- Reorient healthcare delivery systems to deliver affordable, accessible and elder-sensitive services.
- Foster a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) approach to deliver a bouquet of essential and affordable geriatric services
- Establish sustainable finance mechanisms to address older adults’ essential medical needs
- Developing IT innovations to operationalise elder-friendly mechanisms
- Emphasise on non-communicable diseases
- Emphasise on healthcare delivery in slums
- Expand palliative care services
- Incorporate anaesthesia / radiology training in OG post-graduate curriculum.
- Universal health insurance
– Dr Alexander Thomas, Director (CEO) Bangalore Baptist Hospital
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