Hyderabad: Time to bring back family doctors, reboot ailing healthcare infrastructure

HYDERABAD: The effects of growing disappearance of family doctors have been widely felt under the current pandemic with more people rushing to consult super-specialists, even for minor ailments. The pandemic has also exposed a need to revamp the overall medical system which has been creaking owing to a shortage of beds, long waiting queues outside sample-testing laboratories and exorbitant medical bills being charged to patients.
“This pandemic has shown how inadequate our (medical) infrastructure is and we can see it crumbling. The lack of a step ladder system in the medical infrastructure means that there is no filtering of cases happening at the basic level. As a result, it is the patient who is deciding whether she or he needs a test or not whereas it should have been a family physician who decides whether it is viral fever or something else,” said Indian Medical Association Telangana secretary, Dr Sanjeev Singh Yadav.

Corporatisation of hospitals and a number of other platforms that seek to connect doctors with patients have only added to the problem of accessibility to healthcare. In many cases, sources within corporate hospitals have said that several beds have been occupied by either suspected or asymptomatic patients. “When a patient who can afford treatment in a private hospital comes in earlier and gets himself admitted, there are no beds left for others. Once we admit a suspected Covid-19 patient or an asymptomatic patient, we cannot turn them away for at least 14 days. This could have been avoided if there was a referral system,” said a source at a major corporate hospital in the city.
Managements of such hospitals have said that such practices can result in a crash of the healthcare infrastructure. “People are testing themselves, getting a positive and getting admitted even if they are asymptomatic. Healthcare infrastructure will be pushed to its limits and may even crash if this continues. Depending on a family physician or primary care physician will not just ensure that critical patients get the required medical attention but will also result in making treatment less expensive,” said chief of business operations at Medicover Hospitals, India, Mahesh Deglookar.