Health should be seen as investment, not expenditure: WHO chief scientist

“Something as basic as oxygen that saves from pneumonia and was not just essential for Covid, it was Covid exposed that gaps in Oxygen access actually resulted in preventable loss of lives. While our life expectancy has increased from the time of independence, in terms of healthy life expectancy, India’s average is 60 years which means that the last 10-12 years of our life is spent in ill health,” Dr Swaminathan added.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Health and Family Welfare and Medical Education Minister Dr K Sudhakar highlighted the various measures taken by the state government in tackling the health crisis during and after the pandemic.

“Post pandemic we have increased our health staff by 15,000 in addition to the existing workforce. We are increasing the number of medical colleges and augmenting the healthcare facilities. By 2023, the state will have five more medical colleges. We have one doctor for every 800 people, including Ayush doctors, and if I include only allopathic doctors, then we have one doctor for 950 people. Still in the remote areas we don’t have doctors. The villagers do not get access to global healthcare facilities and this is what we are trying to overcome. A person in Bidar should get the same treatment as a person in Bengaluru,” Sudhakar said.

Sudhakar also said that it is important for the government and private hospitals to have a dialogue on making healthcare affordable.

Speaking at the panel, Dr Devi Shetty, Chairman and Founder, Narayana Health said that a lot of international reports exaggerated the Covid deaths in India. “These reports said that the Indian Government has undermined the numbers. But my impression along with all the senior doctors is that India has done extremely well in controlling the number of deaths mainly because of the nature of the disease.”

“During the Covid crisis, if somebody has high fever with difficulty in breathing, it was understood without chest X-Ray that it was Covid. The treatment in England is oxygen and steroids. Now, this is available in each and every nook and corner of our country. You drive on any highway every few kilometres, you find a hospital which will have oxygen and steroids. Most of the patients didn’t get treated in our hospitals in Bangalore. They were treated in 30-bed or 10-bed and five-bed nursing homes. That is a reason why we brought down mortality and in Western countries they didn’t have the privilege because of the zoning system, where the number of beds are restricted, whereas a 30-bed nursing home in India can easily add another 20 beds,” he said

Dr Shetty also highlighted the critical issue of the shortage of nurses in the private hospitals which India could face following the pandemic.

“All over the world there was a shortage of nurses before Covid and after Covid, nearly 10 to 20 per cent of the active nurses in the US and Europe retired. They don’t want to be nurses anymore, because the stress of the job is so much they decided not to be nurses. So, the first thing they will do is to look at a country like India. This will create an impact if they immigrate. We can address this by asking all the hospitals with over 100 beds to start a nursing college with the intake of 50 or 100 students based on the number of beds,” he said.

“And that has to change. A pilot training program recruiting a boy or a girl will get the licence to fly a plane with passengers in it. But a nurse who spent four years in the nursing college is just a beginner learning how to be a nurse. There is something dramatically wrong with the way we train nurses. Nurses from first year onwards should be taught how to interpret ECG, how to look at the cardiac monitor and find out why the patient is in low cardiac output. We need to change our attitude,” Dr Shetty added.