A Doctor.
A Noble professional, looked upon as a leader in the community, who is entrusted with the lives of many. No discrimination in terms of class, gender, race, color, creed can alter the choice of a doctor to intervene and do the necessary to save the life of an individual in front of him/her.
The direct question of life and death often makes a doctor’s role the most accountable and responsible than any other profession. For the very same reason a doctor must be inexplicably trained in a triad of basic requirements.
- Knowledge of normal body functions and abnormal states leading to right diagnosis
- Medical Interventional techniques and medicines
- Ability to communicate ones knowledge to the often common man who might be distressed, confused, stunned. This must develop a doctor-patient relationship which will help tread the scenario at hand as a team.
Of course the third might not always be possible, especially when the patient might be lying unconscious in a pool of blood, or in any other situation, which might not lend the patient a normal state of mind to understand what is being told.
During my time as a physician after practicing in India and U.K, I have found stark differences between the medical professionals from the two countries.
While training in India it’s all about competition, exams, books, books and more books. Competition is necessary but for some reason it takes a very deep dark form when it comes to Indian education. This can be seen in all grades of Indian education right from kindergarten to PhD studies, will discuss this in a future article. An abundant hands-on training comes as a blessing for a medical graduate in India. Reasons for this abundance are better left to be discovered by the reader.
Whereas in U.K , it was a much more controlled , phased method of learning and training. Hands on training was very limited and was reserved for trainees who have completed the required amount of clinical hours and gained enough experience to ensure they adhere to the foundation of the Hippocratic Oath-“Do No Harm”. They give utmost importance to the way a doctor interacts with a patient and how specific scenarios are dealt with. This is what I was pleased with. You become a complete doctor. The way training was conducted and managed had a level of order within the whole system.
Yes, there seems to be hell breaking loose in the N.H.S at the moment with the junior doctors completely against the new proposed system because of inequality of pay with respect to hours of work among other issues. In my opinion, they need to do a few months of rotations in a few Indian hospitals the way Indian Medical graduates work to appreciate what they have. I am not in any way ridiculing the junior doctor movement in the N.H.S but highlighting the sad state of the management of medical training in India and the life of a doctor in India.
Once again as with anything in science there will always be exceptions and there will be many medical professionals perfectly happy with the way things are in India and would like it to continue this way.
But for the rest of you, how would the state of Indian healthcare translate to you if I told you that more than half the medical professional that graduated in India till 2000 have left the country for better prospects? This has since only increased.
We have a doctor to patient ratio of 1:1700 presently in India.
50000 doctors are churned out of 380 medical colleges in India each year
Population increases by 1.2 crore or 12 million people a year.
Which puts the ratio of new graduates to additional population at 1:240
With additional training and increasing number of graduates in the coming years each year our doctor:patient ratio will improve to one of the best in the world eventually. The Indian Medical Council expects it to get to 1:1000 by the year 2031. They have a whole host of plans to achieve this but let’s get down to reality.
After spending years training for extremely competitive exams at every stage, spending money taken on loan and selling your parents land and at times even selling jewelry for fees and capitation costs any doctor would go for better prospects. The service mentality wears down and at often times doctors turn to be cutthroat businessmen hiding behind a lab coat. Corporate entities purchase these doctors to become their healthcare salesman. Patients become numbers and figures in vast algorithms. Who do you blame?
Well, no one. Because we won’t get anywhere by pointing fingers.
We need solutions.
The Indian Medical system needs an overhaul in terms of how it delivers its education, the way the candidates are assessed, equipping itself country wide with an excellent online medical network with access to research tools, reporting tools, electronic patient management systems and teaching medical graduates to be operationally fluent in using these systems. But at the very heart of delivering healthcare education, they need to be taught to communicate to a patient the way they would want to be treated.
A medical graduate should not only be book smart. They need to learn how to present themselves as responsible decision makers in the community and this must be a part of the overall medical training. Early involvement of candidates must be exercised in community issues and while dealing with health care policy. A medical student must be aware not just about disease states but must have a bird’s eye view of what deficiencies are present in delivering healthcare to the ones that need it the most.
For a country with such vast resources, good healthcare and timely diagnosis is still a luxury for majority of the population. I have witnessed this many times over.
I hope in the coming years India would stop being a doctor factory for the world and its corporate entities and guide the excellent cohort of medical professionals that graduate each year to address the perplexing scenario of healthcare for the common man. After all what good is any business if there are no consumers left?
This website is dedicated to the vast majority of people out there who feel like they are not getting the right medical information they need about their own health to make the decision they need to make rather than always being dictated to. This website in no way is an alternate to a medical consultation, it is just a portal to equip yourselves with the right questions/answers to ensure your healthcare provider is doing what he/she is supposed to be doing. “DO NO HARM”.