The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has come out with 25 points road map to ensure good health and well-being for all, one of the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) set out by the United Nations.
The 17 SDGs commonly known as Agenda 2030 covering a broad range of social development issues including health, education, climate change, sanitation, energy, environment and social justice were developed to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which ended in 2015.
Third SDG focusing on good health and well-being aims to achieve universal health coverage to include access to essential medicines and vaccines. It proposes to end preventable death of newborns and children under 5 and end epidemics such as AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and water-borne diseases and reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100,000 live births. Attention to health and well-being also includes targets related to the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, deaths and injuries from traffic incidents and from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination.
Dr KK Aggarwal, national president of IMA said “IMA has helped achieve millennium development goals and now is committed to achieve sustainable development goals. We work hand to hand with the central and state governments in achieving its objectives via profession and community friendly policies.”
IMA is also incorporating social determination of health in providing medical care. IMA Project 'Jiska Koi Nahi Uska IMA' deals with providing avenues to patients from every segment of the society in getting cost effective treatment within their reach and within the same environment where he is living, he said.
Besides this, IMA has come out with 25 points agenda to ensure health for all and appealed to its members to take up them with the government.
Some of the agenda included implementation of one price one drug one company policy so that cost of 80% of medicine can be reduced, appointing general practitioner at public health facilities on retainer-ship basis to implement national health programmes, putting in place single window accountability for people taking law in their hands, single window registration for a health care facility, single registration to practice anywhere in the country, barring Ayush doctors from practicing allopathy, introducing uniform age of retirement, uniform infrastructure, uniform hours of duty and uniform pay scale for doctors at public health facilities.
IMA urged the government to ensure that those completing MBBS get PG seats and those seats where Indian doctors opt out can be given to foreigners. Most of the new seats should be in family medicine.
With an aim to bring preventable deaths to zero, it suggested auditing of every preventable death to find what went wrong so that another such incident does not happen again. It appealed to the government to offer subsidy to private hospitals so that they can reduce ICU establishment costs for poor patients.
It also advocated competence based training instead of theoretical based training, scrapping repeated multiple theoretic exams for doctors to show their updated knowledge status, making IMA CMEs noise free with noise levels between 45-50 dB. All CMEs should have a slide each on pharmacovigilance, bioethics and AMR.
IMA stressed need for informing patient about the cost of treatment. The cost variation should not be more than 10%. It also emphasized on promotion of GeneXpert test for TB and notifying the government body about it.
It further advocated the need for building credibility of doctors among patients. The physicians should explain the reason if they are referring a patient to a specific lab, imaging centre, pharmacy or a hospital.
It also focussed on practicing patient centric medicine where treatment plan is adjusted to patient’s need based on case to case basis and prescribing NLEM drugs and writing non NLEM drugs with consent of patients.