Dr Jitendra for promoting PPP model in health-care services

As we move ahead to promote healthcare services and medical education, Dr Jitendra Singh said, on the one hand we will have to do the course-correction for conscious or inadvertent lapses of the past, and on the other hand we will have to plan for a more constructive outcomes for the future. He said, the policy planners cannot overlook the fact that 1/3rd of the population of India still does not enjoy access to adequate hospital bed-care, while the patient-doctor ratio is far below the global standards in spite of ever increasing number of medical colleges and mushrooming of medical institutions.

A mechanism will have to be devised, said Dr Jitendra Singh, wherein the private and public sectors can supplement each other’s efforts to make their presence available in a more uniform manner and the concentration of healthcare facility in cities also gets diverted to the peripheral areas. For this, he said, the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare can be proposed to evolve a mechanism of single window clearance involving different Ministries dealing with clearing and other issues relating to the setting up of healthcare services.

Dr. Naresh Trehan, while speaking on the occasion, spoke of certain constraints which the private institutions continue to face in spite of their willingness to extend their services to peripheral parts of the country and sought the government’s intervention to facilitate the same. He cited the example of successful PPP model project undertaken by Medanta Hospital with the Haryana State Government for successful completion of Tuberculosis eradication targets in that State.