Govt plans edu model for rural healthcare

New Delhi: In order to bridge the rural-urban healthcare access divide, the government is planning to create a scheme wherein it could impart medical training to selected candidates from rural areas on the condition that they have to serve a certain prescribed tenure in rural areas.

The Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad mooted an alternative model for medical education on Friday primarily aimed towards generation of the rural health manpower. “In the proposed system, admissions would be given to those, who qualify their examination from the schools located in rural areas with an average population of less than 10,000. Upon procuring the qualification they will be asked to serve in rural areas for a prescribed period,” said Azad. The minister added that due to concentration of healthcare professional in urban and semi-urban areas there is a huge gap of availability of manpower at grass-root level. A vast majority of India’s population, over 70%, still resides in rural areas where access to basic healthcare is a challenge even today. The extent of disparity can be assessed by the startling piece of statistics that 80% of our doctors cater to only around 30% of population, living in urban areas. 75% of the country’s total dispensaries and 60% of the total number of hospitals also serve only urban population. This leaves 20% of doctors to attend to 70% of the population living in the countryside. Industry experts also point out that there is a question mark on the quality of doctors and services available in the rural areas. The details of the scheme are being worked out by the Medical Council of India, which has on its agenda-not only mitigating the requirements of rural health manpower, but also ‘capacity building’ for health professionals in the country.”

The National Health Policy 2002 also lists equitable access to healthcare as its overriding goal. These concerned measures involve not only rationalising the existing rules & regulations, at the same time we are also accommodating new ideas required for sustained development, said Azad. The government is contemplating the Public Private

Partnership (PPP) model to set up medical educational institutes, especially in select areas of the country where there is an urgent need to have more medical institutions. The health ministry is evolving a plan to partner with the corporate sector so that they can set up medical colleges in the neglected areas. Azad also touched upon measures such as... relaxation of land requirement for setting up medical colleges, concessions for North- Eastern states and relaxation in teacher-student ratio norms for increasing specialists in the country. “Operationally, these initiatives would definitely bridge the identified ‘crucial gaps’ in the domain of the requirement of the trained health manpower as against the prescribed ratio for health care delivery system. But under no circumstances the desired quality of teaching and training would be compromised” concluded the minister....