‘General Hospital' Model Is Ineffective

India’s multi-specialty hospitals provide sub-optimal healthcare results. Focussed facilities can improve care protocol, lower costs

- Swaminathan Subramaniam

All countries struggle to deliver affordable, high-quality healthcare to their citizens. If a resource-constrained nation like India is to achieve the twin goals of affordable and quality healthcare for all, it will require drastic re-engineering of the healthcare delivery model. India faces two main realities: a large population and low per capita GDP, leaving little room for the substantial investments necessary to build healthcare infrastructure. An acute shortage of doctors outside major metropolitan areas further compounds the problem. The rapid growth in the prevalence of chronic non-communicable diseases threatens to transform a critical issue to one of the apocalyptic dimensions. Successive governments have attempted to bridge the gap between supply and demand by applying band-aid fixes, for example by opening more super-specialty hospitals. This is neither affordable when done at the required scale nor an appropriate response to the supply-demand gap in healthcare.

While primary healthcare has to be the backbone on which any healthcare system is built, we should not be blind to the needs of vast numbers of Indians awaiting hospital-based tertiary care for illnesses like heart disease and cancer. Cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty (Narayana Health) has stated that a country of India’s size requires 2.5 million heart surgeries to be performed each year. About 1,00,000 are performed on wealthy patients who can afford expensive private hospitals. The rest wait endlessly for their turn at overstretched government hospitals and most die before they get the care they need. A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that close to 2.4 million Indians die each year due to lack of access to healthcare or poor quality healthcare.

General hospital model