Mumbai is one of the mega-city of our
country with vast population which needs an efficient and healthy health care system catering to all strata of the society. Health care system is not adequate in this city that’s why the scope of private practice is still of great importance.
I have an experience that a family physician has a greater role for the wellbeing of the patient. He can better handle the patient because he knows about him very well. There are various instances where a patient was treated deficiently by a super specialist because a super specialist often is interested in his own field and neglects or forgets to rule out other problems.
Private practice is an old, gold and very important institution in this city. If we talk about the advantages of private practice we can think upon as:
- Familiarity with patients past medical history.
- A confidence or trust with patient.
- Cost-effectiveness.
- Easy accessibility to the patient.
- More caring touch by doctor.
- Fewer chances of medico-legal hurdles.
- Time saving for the patient.
- Peace of mind for the patient.
With so many advantages, we can say that there is still great scope of private practice because the no. of hospitals and nursing homes are inadequate and population load on this city is much and so only private practitioners can help the patients in this city. But we have to have a complete change over in the present scenario of private practice to make it up to a mark.
We are so much talking about medical tourism in this country also in this city but we have to make sincere efforts to completely change the present health care catering system. Today medical tourism is talk of the town; we must think upon it with sharp strategies. We can summarise few suggestions for medical tourism for private practitioners in this city as:
- Receiving end i.e. at airports there should be warm welcome of foreign patients with all the necessary facilities to be there i.e. - wheel chair or stretcher and immigration deptt. courtesy for the patient.
- Prime driver for medical tourism will be cost. There is 1/6th cost in India in comparison to Western countries.
- There should be favourable policies from government for promotion of the medical tourism.Like make easy the visa problems.
- Formal association of health deptt. and tourism players to discuss their issues at length. Holiday tour operators can make assistance.
- A package can be given which would include flights, transfer, hotels, treatment and post operative vacation.
- Tie up with national and multinational insurance companies and hotel sectors.
- Recuperations at luxerious resorts after the treatments.
- Target patient could be non-resident Indian or foreigner patients.
- Ques - How India can become international destination when clientele at home is bristling with dissatisfaction? The answer is standardise the quality of services. There is urgent need to define minimum level of standards at national level and compulsory at least national accreditation.
- There should be good language coordination between the service provider and target population. Language ability of nurses, paramedics and managements must be good.
- Setting deptt. of telemedicines, video-conferencing with these patients as telemedicine is the future of the medicine.
- Involvement of NGO’s can be useful.
- Modern ambulatory tests in private clinics can be provided.
- Few important questions for medical tourism are how many, from where, to where, how of medical tourism must be answered in reasonable manner.
- Remember, major criteria to attract foreign patients are the satisfied foreigner patients.
Thus we can imagine that there is a lot of work still to do to improve the scope of the private practice in this city. Only we need a strong will with futuristic foresight to encash the privileges related to medical tourism.
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