Whether rural or urban, people need basic amenities to reduce the disease burden and then a large number of family doctors to make treatment of diseases cost effective. Any treatment machinery, including family doctors, will become sustainable only by reducing the disease burden. Unfortunately, the political leadership think that the need of the hour is to increase the number of doctors and medical colleges. Even the Vice President of India, during his inaugural address at the World Conference on rural health in Delhi, expressed that the objective of the government is to set up medical colleges in each district!
What for? To produce specialist doctors? What is needed is to improve all the existing medical colleges and to change the curriculum to offer some kind of training to all UGs to turn them out as family doctors and then sending them to PHCs. The need of the hour is to start…
