The Future of One National Healthcare System Compared With another International Healthcare System

The Future of One National Healthcare System Compared With another International Healthcare System
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Introduction
Health care systems and health care policies are unique for every country. It is important that a country ensures that it has a reliable health care system as a source of income for the citizens, the country as a whole, and to provide health solutions to members of the country whether they can afford it or not. In this paper, we will look at the health care system of India, its past, its future trend and we will compare it to an international healthcare system whose mission is to provide health policy support through promoting high-performing healthcare systems in Switzerland and other countries with the need of improvements in the health sector.
The Indian Healthcare System
The Indian healthcare system relies on a mantra that states: Man and Medicine: Towards Health for All. In India, the relationship between medicine and antiquity is quite profound. For a long time and in many parts of India, cosmological and anthropological perspectives have been used to interpret illnesses and disease. Religious and magical beliefs dominated the mysteries of medicine before modern times. However, owing to the relationship between medicine and human advancement, it is important to view India’s health system based on the recent civilization status and the country’s advancement towards medicine and certain diseases.
The health sector in India is handled by the state, central and local government. In terms of health systems delivery in this country, the state is solely responsible (Reddy et al., 2011). The central government makes sure that health services are available and accessible to union territories that do not have a legislature and also ensures that the recommended national standards of healthcare are suitably developed and monitored by implementing regulations. An efficient healthcare system relies heavily on the level of funds that the country has access to. It is therefore the central government’s responsibility to link India’s states with funding agencies and sponsors that would ensure the smooth flow of healthcare schemes that the government seeks to implement. The central government and the state coordinate to realize the implementations of various healthcare programs that India has. These programs include primary health centres, family planning incentives and campaigns, the Green Revolution that was implemented between 1967 and 1977, national health programs, the national health policy, the National Rural Health Mission, and the Public Health Foundation of India among others.
Healthcare as an industry and a service has evolved over the years into one of the largest sectors in India. It is characterized by dynamic changes and these changes have boosted its development significantly in areas where it poses the potential of being competent at. There are certain factors that mark the difference of India’s healthcare systems with other foreign territories. Its ability to thrive as a constantly developing sector makes it unique in its own right. The rapid growth of the healthcare system in India has been attributed to the vast amounts of funds injected into its implementation in relation to the country’s GDP. Due to this, the industry has experienced record growths of over 10 per cent per annum between 2005 and 2009. The total expenditure on India’s healthcare systems is 5.2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product with a public health investment of 0.9 per cent of the country’s GDP. The government spends 25 per cent of its budget on healthcare systems and this amount is constantly rising as India strives to keep up with the healthcare systems of developed countries (Qadeer, 2014).
At a glance, India’s health and medical infrastructure constitutes eight million, seventy thousand, one hundred and sixty one hospitals, over six thousand hospitals, over five million doctors, close to 200 medical colleges and over seven million nurses. However there is a huge difference between the number of medical facilities in urban and rural areas. The rural areas have not yet been fully explored or exploited in terms of healthcare systems and facilities.
The main objectives of India’s government include the reduction of the maternal mortality rate, the reduction of the infant mortality rate, and the reduction of the total fertility rate. Other objectives include providing clean drinking water to the population, tackling cases of malnutrition among children which is significantly high, addressing the high cases of anaemia among women and girls, raising the country’s sex ratio. Just like most countries, India’s healthcare sector is divided into the public and the private categories. The public health sector’s primary health care category is made up of primary health centres and sub-centres. There is quite a number of hospital facilities in India based on their specific functions. These centres are broken down into community health centres, district hospitals, rural hospitals, specialist hospitals and teaching hospitals. Health insurance schemes are important for every country because they ensure that medical services can be administered to any citizen at any time. Currently, India has two major health insurance schemes namely, the Employee State Insurance Scheme and the Central Government Health Scheme (Balarajan et al., 2011). The defence sector and the transport sector also have health agencies to cater for their employees and their families.
India’s private health sector is not as wide as the public sector and is divided into private hospitals, nursing homes, polyclinics, dispensaries and general practitioners’ facilities. Indigenous systems of medicine still have a significant presence in India. Some of these systems are Unani, Ayurveda and Siddha, homeopath, and other unregistered practitioners. Voluntary health services and national health programs are also developing in India’s health infrastructure. Currently, the larger proportion of healthcare services in India is provided by the country’s private healthcare sector. This is because India’s financial healthcare demands have turned it into a burden for the government as it has gone beyond the country’s budgetary allocations towards the health system. However, this is not a bad sign for India’s expected development of the healthcare system (Mills, 2014). Due to the increasing spending power reminiscent in the country’s middle class, corporate healthcare providers have an opportunity to invest in India’s healthcare industry. The privatization of medical insurance creates an attractive platform of investment for international investors who would like to be involved in India’s healthcare services.
To prevent India’s healthcare system from plummeting, the Indian government has taken initiatives to implement partnerships between the private and the public health sectors up to the lowest levels which are district levels. As a result, rural healthcare facilities have increased from less than a thousand to almost two hundred thousand. The quality of service delivery by public healthcare institutions has greatly deteriorated due to the number of policies and concerns about the management of public facilities. There have been challenges in the country’s health industry characterized by a low availability of medical staff, funding shortfalls that seem to recur and an increasing lack of accountability for the quality of care being provided by public healthcare institutions. Even with a massive public health infrastructure, India exhibits a very low use of this infrastructure. There are challenges in the efficient access of health services and poor people continue to lack the ability to afford private healthcare which has dominated the Indian healthcare market.
The government of India recently resolved to launch the National Rural Health Mission as a means of restructuring the country’s healthcare delivery system. Instead of only offering medical solutions to suffering patients, the Indian government strives to encourage good health by initiating and altering the determinants of a healthy community. These determinants are nutrition, proper sanitation, hygiene incentives and the provision of clean drinking water to rural communities. The National Rural Health Mission’s plan of action was to reduce regional healthcare facility imbalance, increase the public expenditure on health facilities and systems, and pooling as much financial resources as possible to address the issue of poor health systems especially in the rural areas of the country. To deal with manpower problems, the government integrated organizational structures and encouraged community participation by allowing members of the public to own assets in the healthcare system through the NRHM (Rao et al., 2011). Small community health centres were strategically transformed into fully functional hospitals to increase the output of health services without having to build more health centres which would have been more expensive. National public health standards were implemented in every block of the country as this would ensure that health services were equally available across the nation.
India’s health system challenge of a limited institutional capacity led to the formation of the Public Health Foundation of India. This foundation was meant to strengthen areas of research and development, medical training and medical policy development while still providing an avenue for employment and income generation through the country’s healthcare sector. The foundation was a public private partnership that was encouraged through extensive consultations between different constituencies as a way of improving the overall health system of the country. The PHFI was an independent establishment that was formulated to adopt a wide and integrative approach to public health in India by creating operational and objective relevance to India’s conditions and challenges and concerns faced by other countries that were similar to the country’s health problems. Preventive and therapeutic health services that had been ignored during the formulation of health policies and health plans were also brought into focus by the PHFI.
The private healthcare sector in India was more preferable due to the large presence of private healthcare institutions. However, the future of private healthcare in India is threatened by its lack of affordable medical facilities and its emphasis on tertiary and secondary care. It is not mandatory to register for private healthcare services and the system is unregulated making it hard to establish the quality of health services provided by private health facilities. Recent complaints of over-charging and rampant unethical behaviour also make it hard to secure a prosperous future of private healthcare in India. The public health sector together with new initiatives of partnership with the private health sector will help in stabilizing the overall health industry and dictating a better future for India’s health systems. Large demand and supply gaps present in India’s healthcare syst...