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| Future hope: India needs
more doctors than what it produces |
What
can trip up India's healthcare boom? You probably know it already:
A dearth of doctors, nurses and technicians. At present, the country
just doesn't have enough of them. Consider this: According to
FICCI-E&Y estimates, there are just 592,200 doctors and 929,826
nurses in the country. To raise the doctors-to-1,000-people ratio
to 1 by 2012, India will need 1.2 million doctors, and to achieve
a doctors-to-nurses ratio of 1:2, some 2.4 million nurses will
be required by that year. But as things stand, India produces
just 22,000 doctors and 30,000 nurses, which means by 2012, there
will still be a yawning gap between demand and supply. On top
of it, an estimated 10 per cent of doctors and nurses emigrate
from India every year. "Medical migration is a cause of concern
for the healthcare industry in India. The job opportunity landscape
has suddenly changed from West Asia to the US and the UK, particularly
for the nurses," says Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals.
As sector after sector is discovering, the
shortage of skilled manpower is due to a lack of education and
training facilities in India. It is imperative that the government
builds more such institutions or at the least, allows (profitable)
private sector participation in them. The industry is already
lobbying for a say in the curriculum design and training in all
government-run courses. While that will help, the private players
will have to look at creating training infrastructure of their
own. The promoters of Fortis, for instance, have announced plans
of building a Fortis International Institute of Medical &
Bio-Sciences, which will be a "medicity" in Gurgaon,
with a medical college, dental college, nursing college and other
educational programmes. The Medicity will be owned by a non-profit
affiliate and not by Fortis Healthcare.
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| Learning@AIIMS: World class,
but very small |
Others like Care Hospital and Apollo Hospitals
also have nursing colleges and train doctors. Apollo, which has
a full-time workforce of 18,000 and almost an equal number of
outsourced or contractual employees, has nursing and paramedical
training schools (13 of them) and also does campus recruitment.
It intends to double its workforce by 2010. Some other hospitals
are turning to Indian doctors abroad as well. "Over the last
one year, we have launched an aggressive programme to hire some
specialists from abroad," says Mukesh Shivdasani, Executive
Director (Operations), Max Healthcare. And this is yielding fruit.
Recently (early January or so) Max tapped an experienced doctor
from the US, Dr Pervez Ahmed, as the Executive Director of Medical
Operations. Along with Dr Shivdasani, Dr Ahmed makes up the leadership
team at Max Healthcare today.
The setting up of world-class hospitals,
comparable doctor salaries (at least, at the specialist level),
and growing restrictions on licensing and practice within the
European Economic Community are encouraging hundreds of Indian
doctors abroad to return home. And there are more than 60,000
of them to tap; the UK alone has 15,000 doctors of Indian origin.
Recently, the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin
said that more than 5,000 Indian doctors may have returned to
India since April of 2006 due to changes in immigration rules.
"Before 2004-2005, about 10,000 doctors from India used to
come every year. Since the new immigration rules were announced
in April 2006, about 5,000 doctors might have gone back,"
the association's spokesman Raman Lakshman told PTI.
Britain's loss will be India's gain, but
the healthcare industry cannot depend on such supplies to meet
its soaring needs. Domestic supplies have to be stepped up. It's
a familiar problem, but in this case it's the health of a nation
at stake.
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