About Rs 3,70,000 crore is needed to create an additional 17.5 lakh beds and requisite infrastructure for medical education if India wants to achieve the goal of ensuring two hospital beds per thousand population by 2025, according Ernst & Young study.

The study, jointly done with FICCI, says abysmal levels of healthcare outcomes, inadequate and inequitably distributed health infrastructure and facilities, low accessibility of healthcare facilities and lack of initiatives assuring the consumers about the quality of medical care provided are key challenges to be addressed by the country.

The study identifies boosting human resources and public private partnership as key to achieving India's aim of 'quality healthcare for all'. While underscoring the importance of public private partnership in augmenting resources for growth of secondary and tertiary healthcare systems in the country, the report calls for leveraging the managerial capabilities of private sector to enhance the efficiency of government infrastructure.

Considering there is a net addition of around 17,000 doctors per year against a requirement of 7 lakh additional doctors by the year 2025, additional medical colleges would need to be set up. "India will need to proactively address some of the policy impediments which have limited addition of medical education facilities in this country. Such initiatives would more than double the number of doctors by the year 2025, thus increasing the number of doctors from 0.6 to around 1.0 doctor per thousand population," it said.

"While the government has granted a five-year tax holiday to the sector to encourage private entrepreneurs to set up hospitals in Tier-I & Tier-II towns, to bridge the huge supply-demand gap, there is urgent need for rapid expansion of quality healthcare and the sector needs to be accorded the infrastructure status," according to FICCI health committee chairman Shivinder Mohan Singh.

The study will be released at the FICCI Heal 2008 conference and exhibition on August 7 and 8 in New Delhi. According to FICCI secretary general Dr Amit Mitra, "There is a shift from communicable to non-communicable diseases due to changes in lifestyles owing to sustained 8-9 per cent GDP growth. This leads to huge economic losses estimated at 1.3 per cent of GDP. If the healthcare issues are not addressed holistically, these losses to mount to 5 per cent of GDP, a whopping Rs 6,100, 000 crore by 2015."