SME Times News Bureau | 06 May, 2019
V K Paul, NITI
Aayog member recently said that in next 5 years,
India will have 2,500 new hospitals thereby creating 2.5 million additional jobs.
By 2024, India is also likely to attain
the WHO norm of having one doctor for every thousand patients, he said.
Speaking at the launch of certificate
course on 'Specialist Training To
Tackle The Burden of NCDs' organized by FICCI, Paul added that with the improvement in the ease
of doing business in the private healthcare sector, new players will enter the
sector which will not only create new employment opportunities but also provide
better healthcare services.
FICCI, jointly with NITI Aayog, has been working on identifying
innovative alternate methods of strengthening the number of specialized doctors
in India that can be scaled-up, especially for high burden diseases and
conditions.
In continuation to this, FICCI has partnered with ECHO (Extension
for Community Healthcare Outcomes) to launch the first of its kind Diabetes Certification Course for General
Practitioners (GP), considering the WHO statistics of 69.2 million
Indians suffering with diabetes in 2015 and not enough endocrinologists to
deliver specialized care.
Commenting on the tie-up, Dr V K Paul said, "The ECHO model is unique in more than
one ways, but what makes this program even more unique is the partnership with
the industry through FICCI".
He also highlighted that the government
has made provisions to double the number of UG seats in medical education by
2024, but attaining the required number of specialist doctors is a five times
more difficult agenda.
He further added that 80,000 PG seats
will be added by 2024, with participation of private sector healthcare
providers.
Manoj
Jhalani, AS & MD (NHM), Ministry of Health
and Family Welfare, Government of India highlighted the quadruple challenge of
quantity, quality, right skill-mix and physical distribution of human resources
for healthcare.
He said, "It is important to
empower primary health teams and General Physicians (GPs). The Ministry is
working on several aspects to increase number of specialist doctors in the
country and is also exploring participatory approaches for engaging private
sector like contribution for stipends paid to DNB students at both public and
private hospitals."
Sharing ECHO's vision of touching 1
billion lives by 2025, Dr Sanjeev
Arora, Founder & Director, Project ECHO said, "Out of the
1 billion, we want to reach 400 million beneficiaries in India, through
training doctors using the ECHO model of integrated guided practice. India
needs to exponentially increase its capacity building programs and this is not
possible without leveraging technology."
He said that through these partnerships
about 1,000 training hubs can be set up in India. This can be a game changer
and once proven successful, can be replicated to other disease conditions or
specialties or to other sectors like primary education, he added.
The FICCI-ECHO Diabetes Certification Course for
GPs is a 20-week, tele-mentoring program that will be initially taken up as a
pilot project to train 100 GPs on logical management of diabetic patients.