What is the issue?
Developing health and wellness(H&W) centres is a well thought out step for renewing focus on comprehensive primary care.
What is the importance of H&W centres towards ensuring primary care?
- The Union government announced health and wellness centres under its Ayushman Bharat programme as the foundation for public health system in the country.
- These centres are intended to provide outpatient care, immunisation, maternal and child health services, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other services.
- These centres will be linked to secondary and tertiary care and will be supplied with adequate drugs and diagnostic services.
- Once developed, these centres will help ameliorating basic health problems including early diagnosis and treatment of NCDs, thereby avoiding complications in the latter stage.
- This would translate into lower cost of treatments at the secondary and tertiary-care levels.
What are the advantages of primary healthcare?
- Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) with a comprehensive primary-care approach will ensure healthcare with higher coverage and at lower cost.
- Higher public spending in primary care alleviate household out-of-pocket expenditure(OOP) to a large extent.
- It can contribute to realising SDG Goal 3 of promoting Good health and well-being to all with adequate financial protection.
- Countries like UK have already achieved lower rate of mortality and better health outcomes by re-orienting their strategies towards primary care.
What more does it need?
- Focus - A higher percentage of primary care expenditure is on personalised, curative care, leaving a minimum amount for population-based primary preventive care.
- Achieving comprehensive primary care requires a paradigm shift from disease-control vertical programmes(curative) to community-led, people-oriented primary care(preventive).
- Implementation - Involving nurses and allied health professionals in primary care service delivery models can lower the burden of a low doctor-strength ratio.
- The role of public health professionals assumes paramount importance.
- They can help design outreach and preventive programmes and implement the continuing health programme effectively.
- Also a trained pool of social workers, psychiatrists, counsellors with public health orientation can intensify the reach of public service delivery in India.
- Spending - Approximately, 51% of total government expenditure on health is spent on primary care.
- This needs to be stepped up to at least two-third of the government expenditure as suggested in the national health policy.
- Role of states - The states have higher responsibility than the Centre in matters related to health.
- Hence, the blueprints of primary care can further be redefined by the states in view of their local needs.
Source: Financial Express
