Hyderabad: India's public health care system is in a mess of its own creation. In both rural and urban areas the health infrastructure is crumbling and is in dire need of funds. But the crux of the problem lies in one major fact: most of the public health centres function with less number of doctors or none.
According to the Centre for Disease, Dynamic, Economics and Policy, Washington, there is a shortage of around 600,000 doctors in India. Besides, 60 per cent of the Public Health Centres have only one doctor and 5 per cent have none.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in a reply to unstarred question in the Lok Sabha, quoted the Rural Health Statistics (RHS), 2018, and said that public health and hospitals are state subjects, all administrative and personnel matters, including the recruitment of doctors at PHCs, lies with the state governments.
But, the fact remains that without proper financial and technical support from the centre, states will remain helpless. The current economic situation, booming out-of-pocket expenditure and below-par focus on health care, point to the fact that the situation is slated to remain worse in the coming years.
Uttar Pradesh, the state which has the highest number of PHCs, face a staggering shortage of doctors. Out of the 3621 functioning health centres, 2772 of them run with just one doctor, not enough to cover the population of a particular area. And, 735 PHCs run with less than two doctors, making it the state with the worst patient: doctor ratio and infrastructure in the country.
The other states that show poor PHC ratings - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. In fact, Chhattisgarh has 793 functioning PHCs out of which 295 centres have no doctors!
The data shows that Centre's flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat, which stresses on upgrading the sub-health centres, primary health centres and urban primary health centres into Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs), has a long way to go to fix PHCs- the backbone of India's health care system.
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