Rural areas face shortage of public health facilities and medical doctors

Updated on: Monday, January 21, 2013

Public health system in the country was facing a huge crunch of medical professionals, including doctors, in rural areas, a top Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry official said.

"We lack the number of people at all levels. Be it doctors, nurses, specialists, there is shortage. Shortage at the locations we need more of them. We should draw in resources," Additional Secretary Keshav Desiraju said.

Addressing Indo-UK Diabetes Summit here, he said the focus of medical care in the country had been on doctor chain. "Every year, we have over 40,000 newly trained doctors, (but of them,) relatively very small numbers are available for public health system."

Talking to reporters later, he said a national screening for diabetes had so far covered 1.15 crore people and there was a need for involving more personnel. "We have to bring in more people, who are identified in a particular kind of specialisation. We are working on this."

Desiraju said a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) would soon to signed between India and the United Kingdom in the health sector.

"We have identified areas of common interests, primary health care, strengthening institutions. We have identified non communicable diseases, health research, parallel agreement between UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)," he said.

In her speech, UK Minister for Health Anna Soubry said her country was keen to learn from the extensive work being done to improve diabetes care across India.

She said that UK had more to learn from India in terms of traditional medicine and other medical practices.

She also showered praises on nurses from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, working in the UK. She said that nurses in the UK "lost on care" aspect of nursing, and have to catch up from the "best of nurses from India."

Rural areas face shortage of public health facilities and medical doctors

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