(Representative image)You do not need a doctor if you are healthy. To be healthy, you need to have a balanced diet, access to clean drinking water, hygienic surroundings and facilities to exercise. Health care in the real sense involves the social and economic reforms which can ensure these essentials.
Unfortunately, diseases are spreading in the absence of proper health care. India has become a den of vile diseases.
Our population has doubled over the 30 years, while the number of medical colleges, hospital beds and doctor has risen manifold. The number of medical colleges has risen from five to 35. The number of beds in each medical college has increased from 50 to up to 250.
All that is fine. But, how come we still face a shortage of doctors?
Doctors, medical colleges and even the Medical Council of India have succumbed to commercial interests and adopted a depraved view that calls for more specialist doctors. The trend is so entrenched that we have actually forgotten that we need more general practitioners than specialists.
We find it hard to locate a doctor because none of the new graduates choose to become general practitioners. This is a problem which cannot be addressed by the creation of more medical colleges. This calls for a policy overhaul.
We need a policy that requires 75 to 90 percent of medical graduates to be general practitioners. They have to work in primary health centers. If primary health centers are improved and efficient general practitioners are made available in these centers, we can take the load off the hospitals.
We have to introduce a three-tier referral system to stop the influx of patients to general hospitals and medical colleges. All countries practice this system but the United States. If India follows the US system despite its high prevalence of diseases, it only shows our lack of awareness about health and health care.
Nowadays, even primary health centers are peopled by specialists. General practitioners are nowhere to be seen. This situation has led to problems in diagnosis and treatment. Primary health centers have been degraded as places which send any patient to the next level for laboratory tests.
General practitioners have to be treated as the most prominent doctors. They have to be entitled to greater paychecks and perks. Once the policymakers take such a decision, the vanished general practitioners will reappear on their own.
What the land needs is a policy to convert doctors to general practitioners, not the blueprint for more medical colleges.
(The writer is a former head of the Department of Medicine at the Kozhikode Government Medical College and a former president of the KGMCTA)
