Dr Jitendra Singh calls for Make in India health module

New Delhi: The Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh has called for establishing a Make in India" health module. Addressing the CII Health Conference organized by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), he said that this module can be based on public-private partnership as well as multi-centric healthcare collaboration to meet the changing health needs of 21st century India.

Dr Jitendra Singh said that the Indian society, as a whole, is fast evolving and at the same time, in recent years, India too has become a part of shrunken global world and this phenomenon is impacting every sphere of life including the healthcare system. While on the one hand, disorders like Diabetes and heart disease, which were hitherto confined to urban population, are now also on the rise in rural areas, on the other hand, the access to modern modalities of treatment is confined only to cities and big towns, as a result of which 70 percent of rural population gets access only to 1/3rd of country's hospitalization facilities and over 600 million people in the country are deprived of access to affordable healthcare, he added.

Describing the emergence of the private sector as an inevitable phenomenon, Dr Jitendra Singh stressed that for a heterogeneous country like India, public sector healthcare was still very much relevant and therefore, called for a healthy synergism between the public sector and private sector healthcare agencies. He cited the experience from Northeast where he had motivated some of the country's leading corporate sector hospital groups to set up healthcare outlets of different magnitudes depending on the viability of the location, in the form of OPD clinics or diagnostic centers or even full fledged hospitals.

Referring to the constraints of heterogeneity and diversity, Dr Jitendra Singh mentioned topographical and geographical variations in different regions of India. In this regard, he referred to vast expanses of inaccessible areas in the North East where he had proposed the introduction of Helicopter Care Service in the form of Air Clinics wherein specialist doctor could fly to remote areas to hold the OPD and on way back, could also carry some needy patients requiring hospitalization. The same concept, he said, could also be applied to hill states like Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand.