Hyderabad: With general practitioners being brought back into focus in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, India’s universal healthcare scheme Ayushman Bharat to be launched on August 15, will need a relook into its strategy, experts said.The NHS completes 70 years in UK on July 5 and its agenda is to make access to local general practitioners easy. The focus is also on mental health services and improving diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Healthcare is shifting focus to prevention and early detection of the disease so that treatments are less aggressive and life saving mechanisms in preventable diseases can be worked out.
Dr Bhaskar Rao, chief executive officer at KIMS Hospital, said, “Tertiary care centres will work on extremely critical and complex cases. The role of Ayushman Bharat will be to ensure that the area and district hospitals are strengthened. The focus is on rural healthcare.”
While the Indian Medical Association has every year been insisting on focusing on general physicians and family doctors, the trend in the last few years has not been encouraging. With the UK again focusing on general practitioners, doctors are optimistic that the tide will turn in India too.
The NHS has 13,265 doctors of Asian nationality, two-third of them from India or Pakistan.
