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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Govt Report Says PHCs Have Surplus Doctors – But That’s Not the Full Story -Banjot Kaur

Govt Report Says PHCs Have Surplus Doctors – But That’s Not the Full Story -Banjot Kaur

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published Published on May 12, 2022   modified Modified on May 13, 2022

-TheWire.in

* According to the Union health ministry’s new Rural Health Statistics report, for 2020-2021, primary health centres have a surplus of doctors.

* This could be true – although there are doubts about whether the report included the number of doctors on transitory, ad hoc appointments as well.

* The report fails to capture the qualitative aspects of doctors’ availability at PHCs, including a hidden problem motivated by the absence of sufficient incentives.

New Delhi: On May 5, the Union health ministry released the Rural Health Statistics (RHS) report for 2020-2021. The report quantifies crucial personnel availability issues to which patients’ experiences and media reports alike have alluded – for example, that community health centres have an 80% shortfall of specialist doctors.

Oddly, however, the report also says that 19 states and six Union territories have reported more doctors at primary health centres (PHCs) than are actually required. This is a triumph – or is it?

PHCs have one MBBS-level doctor each plus other support staff. Their mandate is to be the second point of care for care-seekers in rural areas (the first is health sub-centres, which don’t have fully trained doctors but help to screen patients and refer them to the appropriate facilities). Typically, each PHC serves around 30,000 people.

To have more doctors than there are PHCs is for a state government to be able to claim that the state’s rural population is well taken care of. But this conclusion is at odds with India’s long-standing, and widening, disparity of access to healthcare between rural and urban areas.

The 2019-2020 RHS had also found many of India’s states and Union territories reporting a similar situation – with the addition this year of Uttar Pradesh. In the previous RHS, this state had reported a shortfall of 121 doctors at PHCs against a requirement of 2,880 doctors, and this year has reported an excess of 170.

“It is very difficult to believe these numbers,” Sunita Singh, a training officer at a civil society group called Sahyog, which has worked in Uttar Pradesh, said.

Even if there is a doctors’ surplus on paper, she added, there is a ground-level issue that undermines the statistic: they are often absent.

“As a result,” Singh said, “the poor patients are forced to go to private healthcare facilities, which have now opened in good numbers in rural areas as well.”

Dr Shakeel, a doctor practising in Patna and running a civil society organisation named Charm, echoed her, and added, “It is not that the state government [of Bihar] is not aware” of doctors not being present.

Local media reports reflect his comment. Just last month, a report in a local edition of Hindustan, a Hindi daily, said a surprise inspection at a PHC in Bhagalpur, Bihar, couldn’t find the doctors on duty. Bihar is one of the states to have reported a surplus in the recent RHS.

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TheWire.in, 12 May, 2022, https://science.thewire.in/health/rural-health-statistics-2020-report-doctors-surplus-primary-health-centres/?fbclid=IwAR1sI-7AOxy-ne0fvPaj74F4K-FYWdjsLnJpNtce6WkZb6cDnK2IodB5fgA


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