Healthcare in Rural India: The Real Story
Every person has the right to healthcare, however 60% of Indians lack access due to poor infrastructure, a shortage of skilled medical professionals, and lack of access to basic medications and medical facilities. The majority of the 700 million people reside in rural areas, where medical services are in appalling condition.
To ensure that timely and high-quality healthcare reaches the underserved areas of Indian villages, new techniques and processes are urgently needed in light of the bleak picture painted by the facts. Although the government runs numerous policies and programs, the effectiveness and viability of these initiatives are in doubt because of execution flaws.
In rural India, where there are few primary health care centers (PHCs), 8% of the facilities lack medical professionals or doctors, 39% lack lab technicians, and 18% lack even a pharmacist.
The majority of maternal fatalities occur in India. Most of these occur in rural regions with inadequate maternal health care. Even in the private sector, health services are sometimes limited to family planning and antenatal care and do not cover more crucial services like labor and delivery, when proper medical care can save lives in the event of problems.
The Issues
The majority of individuals in India choose the local private health sector as their first option for care since public health care is inaccessible and of poor quality. 92 percent of visits to healthcare facilities in India are to private ones, with 70 percent of the population living in cities. Private healthcare is nevertheless pricy, frequently unregulated, and of varying quality. Low income rural residents cannot afford it, and it is unreliable for the illiterate.
Special attention must be paid to rural health care in order to stem the spread of diseases and lower the rising death rates brought on by inadequate medical facilities. The primary issues facing the healthcare industry include inadequate care quality, lax accountability, ignorance, and restricted access to services.
Technology is a key enabler of the collaboration of numerous groups working to enhance health care. Many options are available thanks to information and communications technology for the effective execution of these changes.
Health Care Technology for Rural Areas
With the aid of mobile technology, a number of organizations are collaborating with the government and NGOs to lessen the strain on the public health system.
India has approximately 900 million mobile phone users, and by taking use of this fact, better practices can be implemented even in distant places. Leading international healthcare institutions are utilizing mobile technologies to improve the standard of treatment and close service gaps.
Gram Vaani offers state-of-the-art mobile and IVR solutions to automate procedures and uses industry best practices. For connecting with the hard-to-reach markets at the base of the pyramid, our services are geared at the health care industry, the social sector, and corporate groups.
Increasing local healthcare standards
For prestigious international organizations, we are utilizing mobile technology in numerous healthcare projects. For a Merck for Mothers program, we are collaborating with the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood to improve the standard of maternity care in India. Growing data from developing nations supports the idea that how patients feel about their care and how satisfied they are with it are important factors in how often they use health services.
In order to achieve this, we are developing a quality-of-care checklist that expectant mothers (and their families) can complete on mobile devices and rate based on aspects like whether they received entitlement for an institutional delivery, whether the transportation provided was of high quality, etc.
This device is used for:
educating women on their rights to request high-quality treatment,Increasing the uptake of suitable health services at the appropriate venues, bringing accountability by drawing attention to gaps in the health delivery process.
With NGO's PATH and PCI, we are mobilizing communities in Bihar as part of another healthcare program called Ananya to demand more responsibility from the health delivery infrastructure.
We educate underserved populations about their rights and entitlements under the health delivery system through straightforward education and discussion programs delivered via mobile devices. On our open mobile platform, community members are invited to interact, share their experiences, and demand the resolution of grievances as well as responsibility from the healthcare system.
https://gramvaani.org/rural-health-care-towards-a-healthy-rural-india/
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