In India, there is one government allopathic doctor for every 10,189 people, one government hospital bed for every 2,046 people and one state-run hospital for every 90,343 people.
You don’t need an epidemic, however predictable, for the public health system to collapse. It is a matter of routine that patients share beds and doctors are overworked.
India has a little over one million modern medicine (allopathy) doctors to treat its population of 1.3 billion people. Of these, only around 10% work in the public health sector, shows data from the National Health Profile 2017.
The shortage of health providers and infrastructure is the most acute in rural areas, where catastrophic health expenses push populations the size of United Kingdom into poverty each year.
Add apathy and you have bodies of the dead being mutilated by dogs in hospital morgues, people carrying home the their dead children because the hospital refused them a hearse, and tragedies like the hundreds of infant deaths in Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College every year.
BRD Medical College Hospital’s failure to save lives points to a systemic rot in public healthcare delivery, which is saddled with problems of mismanagement and inadequate resources — infrastructure and human.
Despite being routinely flagged, these shortages are seldom corrected. Learning from failure is rare, and course correction after mistakes is rarer.
