NO MATTER how successfully India has handled the COVID-19 crisis for the past one year to win global praises, the general condition has emphasised the need to start building again the overall healthcare systems in the country so that it would not have to face the crisis it is confronted with currently. We must thank the coronavirus crisis paradoxically for giving us an opportunity to take a good second look at what we would need in the future, and rebuild accordingly the healthcare ecosystem. The beginning of this campaign can be done by assessing realistically how badly equipped we were as a country to handle any medicare challenge of pandemic proportions. We must admit that even in India’s mega-cities like New Delhi (Delhi), Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Nagpur, the overall condition of healthcare system was far from adequate even for normal challenges. It was India’s good luck that no terribly serious medicare challenge ever hit the country in the past few years.

 

Had that happened, we would have known how woefully short we were of the optimal levels of medicare services across the board. This terrible lagging below the normal levels came to fore mostly at tertiary levels with big public or private sector hospitals in our megapolises. If that was the factual position in big places, then one can imagine how terrible things must be at the primary or secondary levels spread out in the vast national landscape. It was still our good luck that the villages were affected almost negligibly by the coronavirus. That really reduced the overall burden of the challenge nationally. It is in the light of this reality that it is beyond the normal power of imagination to know what would have happened on the ground if the pandemic had spread to semi-urban and rural sectors. All these dimensions now make it mandatory for us to start making in-depth plan to reshape and rebuild our healthcare systems to futuristic levels.

 

For, India must be fully prepared to meet any such challenge in the future -- that promises to be full of difficulties to the humanity on health front, owing mainly to the careless manner of handling environmental issues. In view of this, India needs an extensive and intensive plan to spread evenly the core as well as peripheral healthcare facilities down to the primary levels -- in villages and hamlets where the number of people is small but the the medicare issues are quite demanding. India needs an inverted pyramidal management of medicare with the primary levels being treated as equal beneficiaries alongside mega-city infrastructure.

 

It must be admitted with satisfaction that in the past 2-3 years, the Government has added multiple dimensions to the national thought and action for improvement in healthcare management. not only has it paid attention to introducing modern advancement in medical technology at multiple levels, but also has tried fairly successfully to include traditional systems of medicine as well in the overall treatment panorama.

 

The initiative of Ayush Ministry is truly laudable in this context. Despite this, the reality is that India’s overall healthcare management needs a lot of refurbishment that cannot be achieved by verbose lip-service but by honest assessment of ground reality and transparent allocation of all resources to achieve highest possible levels of efficiency for the benefit of even the last and the least sections of the population. The challenge is rather too big for ordinary, run-of-the-mill imagination to manage. What is needed, therefore, is a very well-planned process of planning that would consider every possible nuance of healthcare in the modern times afflicted unfortunately by the global failure in climate management. Each aspect of healthcare -- from core to peripheral to pharmaceutical to educational -- will have to be woven with much care and caution into the larger plan of action that should have longtime terms of reference. That alone will make up ready for the task.