To mark its platinum jubilee, Tata Memorial Centre organised a 3-day healthcare conference on 27-29 January 2017 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.
Taking the stage on day two to address the eminent gathering of national and international health experts and economists, Nobel Laureate and Bharat Ratna recipient Dr Amartya Sen acknowledged the criticality and relevance of the conference theme "Healthcare: A Commodity or Basic Human Need?" In his keynote address - "Healthcare for all – Why and how?" he went on to state that "although India has made great progress on the economic front, our progress in healthcare has so far been extraordinarily limited."
Healthcare should include the social determinants of health, such as nutrition, sanitation and social equity. A higher proportion of GDP should be devoted to public healthcare. There is a complete and total lack of public discussion on the subject. “The issue has not been raised by any political party during the elections in India,” Dr. Sen observed.
"Public healthcare demands better work ethics, along with the urgent need for efficient, sustainable initiatives to bring about a change. We must be innovative," he urged.
More recognition is needed for the central role of public healthcare. People need to ask questions for us to move closer to our goal of achieving universal health coverage by 2030. “The exploitation of poor, ignorant patients at the hands of private doctors has to stop. Though privatisation plays a role, it cannot be our solution,” said Dr. Sen. The ‘moral hazard’ involved in subsidising private hospitals for unverified treatments needs radical reform, he said.
Dr. Sen concluded, “Our neighboring countries like Bangladesh, China and Nepal, with similar or even lower income levels than India, have better health and social indicators. These include lower infant and maternal mortality rates, increase in girl schooling and improvement in sanitation facilities. It is disconcerting to note that despite being the world’s largest democracy, we are far from achieving reasonably good standards of healthcare delivery in India even today. I am grateful to Tata Memorial Centre for providing me with the opportunity to have this discussion, and I am hopeful that a conference of this kind can bring together all stakeholders to address these issues.”
Earlier, Dr. Rajendra Badwe, Director, TMC in his welcome said Dr. Sen’s presence was among “the key highlights” of Tata Memorial Centre’s 3-day Platinum Jubilee Conference. He also commented that “Just like a business, a successful healthcare model requires accountability, affordability, accessibility and sustainability, the only difference being, in the case of healthcare, our primary aim is to reduce customers. This can only be achieved with the support and commitment of all stakeholders, and this is what we hope to achieve through our conference.”
The conference, “Healthcare: A Commodity or Basic Human Need?” brings together national and International representatives of health systems across the world, to address this very relevant question.
Day one of the conference brought together leading health experts from Brazil, Thailand, Zambia, Japan, Iran, France and Cuba, who shared examples of their country’s health systems and efforts to achieve universal health coverage. The various opportunities and challenges for a country on the road to UHC were discussed and deliberated, a discussion that has enormous national implications for India, in its journey to achieve the SDG goal of universal health coverage by 2030.
The conference will conclude on day three, with various sessions and discussions on the role of NGOs, CSR, Importance of Health Communications among others.
BW Reporters
The author is associate editor at BW Businessworld
