Written By: Nirmalya Dutta | Updated : July 29, 2013 2:43 PM IST
The Bachelor of Science (Community Health) course has been dealt a severe blow with a parliamentary standing committee recommending the government not to go ahead with it. The course which has surfaced under different names from time to time is known to have the backing of Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and has been a bone of contention between doctors and the Health Ministry. This is the second time that the Health Ministry and standing committee are clashing the last time it was about the controversial National Commission for Human Resources in Health (NCHRH) Bill which was viewed by the medical community as a regressive move to make the healthcare system of this country more bureaucratic.
The standing committee noted that most healthcare services in the rural sector were being provided by untrained people and instead urged to government to increase the intake of MBBS graduates and make a compulsory one-year rural posting for them to tackle the manpower.
The committee went on to add that the infrastructure at district hospitals were inadequate to train students for the proposed Bachelor of Science (Community Health) course and the community added that these would endanger the lives of patients by creating half-baked doctors. It s also important to note that since the government can t prevent doctors from starting private practices there was no way they could prevent the Bachelor of Science (Community Health) graduates from migrating to other areas and setting up clinics under the guise of being doctors and MBBS graduates.
Ever since the economy was opened by our current PM the gap between the haves and have-nots has been increasing and that includes access to healthcare services. Gandhi had imagined India as a land of self-sustaining villages and the grim reality of life in rural India would ve upset him greatly. While more and more private hospitals spring up in urban India, the access to even the most basic primary healthcare services remain non-existent in rural India. There have been various different initiatives that the government has proposed to improve rural healthcare including a compulsory period of service for MBBS and PG students but the IMA and various students associations have been up-in-arms against these courses and protested vehemently to have them reversed. Even if they were implemented most doctors would find a way of getting out of them by greasing a few palms. The only feasible alternative is doing what the government is suggesting training rural healthcare providers so that at least the basic primary services are available to people in rural India.
