The Devils Arithmetic

Let us rescue our healthcare from the sick bed

Health service in our country is in bad shape. It is impossible to conceal and ignore it any longer. The withdrawal of the government from the service sectors has created havoc. It has resulted in untold miseries to millions. It has left the healthcare sector high and dry. Private enterprises and corporate bodies have grabbed this sector. The hardest-hit in this game are the poor. The supreme challenge before us today is the provision of reasonable healthcare for one and all.

When the Chinese faced a shortage of medical personnel, they produced a large number of barefoot doctors. It did not work because the training imparted to them was inadequate and inappropriate. We are on the verge of committing the same mistake. The Central government plans short-term medical courses to produce half-baked doctors for our rural poor.

However, China has come up with a $124-billion plan. This is intended to correct the existing chaos over the next three years. There are additional steps to provide healthcare to all by 2020. They plan 29,000 new local medical centres and 2,000 new country-level hospitals; additional training for 1.37 million village-level and 160,000 community-level doctors; and caps on drug prices.

Obviously in India, there are not enough primary and secondary health centres. They are not distributed evenly through the length and breadth of the country. Further, the health centres are not equipped well, nor are they manned by adequately trained staff. We have to build more primary and secondary health centres, locate them in appropriate places and enhance the treatment facilities.

Then there is the question of management of these new health centres. The key person in charge has to be the doctor. Luckily, we have no dearth of doctors. One would be surprised to know that in Kerala, with a population of 3.33 crore, there are 43,260 MBBS qualified doctors registered with the Medical Council and practising, i.e., one doctor for less than 800 people (not patients). Kerala is not alone in this matter. The MBBS qualified apart, there are quite a number of doctors practising other well-established systems (ayurveda, unani, homoeopathy, etc). We have also to reckon with a number of quacks doing the healing art with impunity, disastrous to patients and detrimental to the public interest. Thus, the problem is not one of numbers, but of quality and their uneven distribution.

The Devil's Arithmetic Kirsten Dunst Brittany Murphy Mimi Rogers ...

The Devil’s Arithmetic

This movie the holocaust, told from the view of a modern young girl who lives with the Jewish customs, but when she’s asked to “open the front door” as part of the Passover supper she finds that she, has entered the 1940′s and has stepped into the life story of a captive in one of the German death camps where she undergoes all of its repugnances firsthand.

The devil's arithmetic

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