India Has Acute Shortage of Healthcare Managers: Chandigarh Needs 62% More Healthcare Providers: Dr. Sanjiv Kumar

By Samachar Vishesh News

Chandigarh 27^th Feb, 2019:- While India has made progress in its health indicators, it needs to strengthen its existing health services and add more professionals especially in rural areas, said IIHMR Delhi Director, Dr. Sanjiv Kumar today.

Dr Sanjiv Kumar stressed that the Health scenario in India has changed. Of about 1 crore deaths in India in a year, 60 lakhs are due to cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes etc. Another 12 lakhs die of injuries and accidents. Maternal child health and infectious diseases account for the remaining 28 lakhs.The coverage by various interventions for these conditions need to increase.

The 4^th National Family Health Survey shows that while Chandigarh has succeeded in improving its health indicators, the current situation leaves a lot more room for improvement.

Similarly, 1 in 2 women receive post-natal services, a significant improvement over the 1 in 7 women that received these services in 2006-07.

IIHMR Delhi recommends that the number of health personnel in primary and secondary healthcare system should be as per the NHM guidelines and an increased health budget should be twice of existing health budget over the next 5 years.

Dr. Sanjiv Kumar also said that 50% dependency on private hospitals by urban population is adding to the healthcare bill and needs to be tackled.

According to National Health Profile-2018, Chandigarh has Rsl354 per capita health expenditure. It is lower in compare with national average.

Highlighting issues that plague the healthcare system Dr. Sanjiv Kumar, Director IIHMR Delhi said that there are problems of access, quality, lack of feedback from end users and continuum of care, especially in non-communicable disease like cardio vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and hypertension which constitute 60% of the death burden.

The lnternational lnstitute of Health Management Research, New Delhi was setup in 2008 to cater to the growing needs in the country. The institute undertakes capacity building of health professionals in a big way through the executives training programs. Till now, 700 have been trained and all of them got placed. Institute has successfully completed more than 50 research projects and 300 plus training programmes both at national and international levels.

He added that Institutions like IIHMR provide trained manpower in health, health IT and hospital management. Many problems arise because healthcare systems are not managed well. We, need people who are qualified and trained as hospital managers and who can take care of management related issues so that doctors can focus on providing clinical care which they are trained for.