(Prashant Diwedi)The public health system of the state as well as country is falling apart. Government meanwhile has no concrete plans to address the catch 22 situation and is engaged in symptomatic treatment of the system instead of finding ways and means to weed out the root cause of the failure. Recent incidents amply demonstrate these failures viz. Death of infants and other patients at Gorakhpur Medical College which is an ongoing process, Incidents of deaths of patients in West Bengal and Gujarat and deaths of patients in other hospitals due to lack of infrastructure and in some cases negligence. Despite all these shortcomings government leaving no opportunity to pat its back that everything is fine.

Numerous Medical Colleges have sprouted throughout the country and still dearth of Medicos in the public health system as one of the causes as was validated by recent study published in Medical Journal, BMJ Open. The study depicted that length of Medical Consultation at primary health level in India is meager 2 minute per patient whereas in western countries it is 20 minutes on an average. It is a glaring example of How Indian Public health system functions for such a large population.

Such a short consulting time leads to adverse patient care and workload effects the over burdened consulting physician. OPD departments of a primary health care centers are full of patients reporting in hundreds whereas consulting physicians are limited in number. The states of Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh have reported multiple shortages of Doctor’s. In the month of June The National Human Rights Commission was forced to issue notice to the State government of Tamil Nadu on the plight of patients due to shortage of Doctor’s at primary health level.

In the Month of May U.P. Health Minister Siddhartha Nath Singh explained in the house that we have shortage of 7000 Doctors in the system. The recent steps of State government of Uttar Pradesh to address these shortcomings met with a limited success when only Ayush consultants joined the services and negligible Allopathic doctors showed interest in joining the primary health system. Will the government devise means and ways to address the issue so that at least India improves its present worst ranking in the world ?