“Private Sector, Government Need To Work Together To Make Healthcare Accessible In Rural India”

For the first time National Heath Policy is talking about the preventive healthcare and wellness. From the statement point of view, it is really a commendable thing but now it has to be translated on to the ground. Harish Pillai COO, Indus Health Plus in an interaction with BioSpectrum India talks about why preventive healthcare is the need of the hour and how it can be successful.

- Kalyani Sharma

How crucial is the role of preventive healthcare as far as Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are concerned?

If you look at Indian statistics, one in four is a cardiac patient and one in ten is a diabetic and cancer is the third largest. World Health Organisation (WHO) clearly says that one third of every cancer can be prevented if detected at the early stage. Unfortunately it is detected at the third stage or fourth stage with lot of money being spent and losing a person as well. So any form of preventive healthcare which helps to detect a disease or helps to detect the NCD condition at the early stage can be cured. If you detect a blockage at 40%, it can be cured through allopathic or ayurvedic medicine and reaching a stage of angioplasty can be easily avoided which cost a lot. If large percentage of Indian was doing pro-active exercise with some lifestyle changes, this huge burden of NCDs would definitely be coming down. We have 63 million people suffering from cardiovascular diseases in this country, 70 million from diabetes and cancer kills 8-9 lakhs people every year. These are the actual numbers (actual number of people affected) and the cost of this is even further.

We are losing billions of dollars of our economy in tackling this problem. But unfortunately we don’t have a solution to this yet. Neither the government nor the private sector is able to give any solution. They both have to work together in order to give a solution which can affect the large masses of people.