Sheik Maqbool
Education and the health are the prime need of people and are neglected fields, health and education service sector which are counted as a noble profession in the past has become the field of investment for private business.The Health sector has a mix of both public and private providers of health services. Government’s services relating to combating covid 19 can be effectively reached to the rural households by volunteers. The incidence of disease may be reported to the doctors and para health workers facilitate supply of drugs . Wherever necessary affected persons may also be hospitalized by the volunteers. They may also facilitate institutional delivery of children to avoid risk to the child or the mother. The private sector and the quality of care provided is variable, ranging from informal providers to individually run nursing homes to large polyclinics. The regulation for cost and quality of care is largely absent. Such a despicable and condemnable outlook and attitude of the government even smacks of a colonial heritage, where the imperialist rulers advocated lower qualified ‘native doctors ‘refuse to go to villages? Is not it primarily because of the miserable lack of infrastructure in the government hospitals and health centres, in both rural and urban areas and particularly in the former ,as well as the lack of minimum support for basic living facilities In the rural areas . The doctors are really thrown into quite a difficult situation, but the responsibility of treatment will be the doctor’s, he or she will have to act without proper support from the government. Besides, rampant privatization and commercialization of education, including its medical version have made it a high -priced commodity to be purchased by an aspiring doctor at staggering amounts and aganist high fees in government colleges. It has not only shattered the process of judging merit or maintaining the minimum qualification required for a would be a doctor. This commercialization has also affected the mind set of medical students.
Instead of shifting the onus on to the doctors for refusing offers for rural service, the government should have offered them decent , adequate remuneration and improved living and working conditions free from local political or other types of interference .
The spirit of rendering an immensely valuable service to the fellow countrymen is vanishing into thin air from the majority section of medical students. They rather tend to look a quick return of the money they invested in their studies and thus seek for working in areas that would bring them money. Naturally they may not consider remote villages with hapless, abject poor people as the right choice. Had the government been really serious at this crucial time in finding out a solution to the dearth of Doctors for villages, they would and should have opted for improving the infrastructure and facilities in rural areas and the hospitals and health centres there . In place of setting up rickety institutions as a semblance of health centres, they should have set up well equipped hospitals. Instead of shifting the onus on to the doctors for refusing offers for rural service, the government should have offered them decent , adequate remuneration and improved living and working conditions free from local political or other types of interference . Skirting these responsibility , the government encourages on the one hand , the setting up of modernised equipped privately run medical institutions in cities where treatment cost is exorbitant and out of the reach of common people where attitude towards patients is starkly commercial even in the case of emergency treatment or saving a patient’s life. We have to come forward to save the medical ethics and have to stand with medical professionals who are struggling hard to hold high the banner of medical ethics .
( The Author is Vice chairman J&K RTI Foundation .Views are his own, [email protected] )
