A Lesson for Policy Makers : Please Keep Quite and Listen

Govt : It is  all  because  of  the  doctor's  fault who is qualified 

and has done more than 50,000 surgeries AND we are innocent 

as usual.

The current state of our health system is pathetic if not more and is hardly going the right way. A recent article in a leading daily exposed it all. As quoted by the newspaper "All 83 tubectomy operations done laparoscopically at a free medical camp at  Bilaspur, Chhatisgarh failed. If it was not enough, 11 of them died of blood loss/complications and other 50 are still hospitalized. This is because all the surgeries were done by a single team using a sole laparoscope in just a few hours." If you didn't understand what just happened-"83 perfectly healthy lives are fighting the odds who underwent an elective procedure (which was not necessary for a healthy life) at a government approved center by a qualified person". Imagine,if  this happened to the  ladies who were doing the right thing in a supposedly right way what would be happening otherwise. And shockingly this might just be the tip of the iceberg. This is more like a massacre because it has taken more lives than a  small scale terrorist attack/ bomb blast that barely manages to make it to the newspapers. 

Ground Breaking Breakthroughs

If this is the state of our health system, our government should be speeding in top gear to cut the chase but quite surprisingly they were hardly moving and just took a reverse gear. Yes you read it right. Our government is doing their best to skew the statistics in their favor (Chhattisgarh was just an example: they were just trying to meet the goals set by the center) and making policies to woo the voters rather than patients. 

Recent amendment in the MTP Act allowing those practicing Ayurveda, Homeopathy and midwives to do abortions tells the same story.Getting the MTP done by untrained and unprofessional general practitioners is in anyway a retrograde step because neither they are trained or have background knowledge for this nor they would be equipped to handle any emergency arising out of this MTP which might jeopardize the life of a pregnant woman. If these amendments are implemented, more of Chhattisgarh type massacres can be expected to make it to the headlines.

Oh! He is doing fine...

Another vote grabbing move came when a new course 'Bsc (community Health)' for rural medicine was announced. It is retrograde because instead of upgrading the infrastructure the central government thought of downgrading the education/degree to meet the required numbers and by putting RMP's in place of doctors. This is happening when nothing is being done to meet the gaps in medical education, recruitment of doctors has remained patchy and the infrastructure practically doesn't exist. The picture doesn't seem to change if doctors are not included in policy making and the big claims in files start getting reciprocated in the real world. Hope it happens soon enough.