HEALTH CARE AVAILABILITY

WHAT IS HEALTH CARE?

Health care is the maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, recovery, or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people.

WHAT IS HEALTH CARE AVAILABILTY?

An essential health care made universally accessible to individuals and acceptable to them, through their full participation and at a cost the community and country can afford to maintain at every stage of their development in the spirit of self reliance and self determination.

Hospitals are the major and the vast network by which we can make health care available to each and every citizen of the country. Hospitals play an important role in shaping public perception of the performance of countries' health systems. It is an institution where the sick or injured are given medical or surgical care.

As we all know that this is a tough time for all of us due to the pandemic and we have suffered a lot in the last one and a half year. There was a lot of chaos in the last year due to improper health care availability. There were shortage of oxygen as well as beds due to which many patients had suffered lot and many of them died also.

DEFICIENCY OF HEALTH CARE CENTRES

There are many reasons behind the deficiency of health care centres out of which some are described below:

Lack of Infrastructure

India has been struggling with deficient infrastructure in the form of lack of well equiped medical institutes. The rate of building such as medical teaching or training facilities remain less as compared to the need of the hour. The government regulation mandated that private medical colleges must be built on at least five acres of land. As a result of which quite a few private colleges were built in rural areas where it became quite difficult to recruit adequately qualified, full-time doctors due to lack of proper living conditions, besides low pay scales.

Shortage of efficient and trained manpower

One of the most critical problems in India remains a severe shortage of trained manpower in the medical stream this includes doctors, nurses, paramedics and primary health care workers. The situation remains worrisome in rural areas where almost 66 percent of India's population resides.

The doctor-to-patient ratio remains extremely low which is merely 0.7 doctors per 1000 people. This is compared to World Health Organisation(WHO) average of 2.5 doctors per 1000 people. Improving this situation continues to remain a long term process.

Unmanageable patient-load

During the COVID-19 pandemic and even prior to that health care facilities had been feeling the strain due to unmanageable patient-load. Moreover, serving a population of 1.4 billion remains a Herculean task in itself when it comes to suitably managing health care facilities. There becomes shortage of beds and oxygen cylinders due to which many people has to suffer and many of them also lose their lives.

High out-of-pocket expenditure remains a stress factor

Public hospitals offer free health services, these facilities are understaffed, poorly equipped, and located mainly in urban areas. It is a known fact that accessible and affordable healthcare in the public sector can considerably reduce the rise in dependence on private institutions. However, governmental facilities leave no alternatives but to access private institutions and incurring high out-of-pocket expenses in healthcare. Most health services are, therefore, provided by private facilities, and 65 per cent of medical expenses in India are paid out of pocket by patients.

CONCLUSION

Primary health care has a high potential to address the social determinants of health, as it can contribute to improvement of access, especially for those most in need. Moreover it contributes to empowerment and social cohesion, and is oriented towards the improvement of the living conditions of the local community. Some measures to enhance the impact of primary health care are;

1.To guarantee universal access to primary health care through an adequate health system.

2.Education, recruitment and retention of adequate staff, improving the clinical and population oriented performance of the primary health care system.

3.Establishment of a proper primary health care service, integrated in the district health system. This primary health care should act as the first point of contact for the population, should be able to deal with more than 90% of all the presented problems, and should act as a filter and help patients to navigate in a cost-effective and high-quality way through the health care system.

4.Health systems should be organised in an intersectoral network, with cross links to environment, economy, work and education at the different institutional levels (national, province, district).