India’s doctor-patient ratio

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New Delhi, November 21, 2019:

There is one modern medicine doctor for every 1,445 Indians as per the country’s current population estimate of 135 crores. A total of 11,59,309 allopathic doctors were registered with the state medical councils and the Medical Council of India (MCI) as on March 31. Assuming an 80% availability, around 9.27 lakh doctors are available for active service, which put the allopathic doctor-patient ratio at 1:1445.

Besides, there were 7.88 lakh Ayurveda, Unani and Homeopathy doctors in the country and assuming an 80% availability, it is estimated that around 6.30 lakh doctors practising traditional systems of medicine are available for service and considered together with allopathic doctors, it threw up a doctor-patient ratio of 1:860.

Considering the number of registered medical practitioners of both modern medicine and traditional medicine, India has already achieved the WHO recommended doctor to population ratio of 1:1,000.

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Points to debate

1. On what basis WHO recommended a population to doctor ration of 1: 1000 for all countries and did not divide the ratio based on economic development
2. WHO did not differentiate the modern medicine vs the traditional Nation based medicine available in many countries like AYUISH in India?
3.  AYUS in India also contains Naturopathy and Yoga, the number if includer the present ration will become further lower that 1: 860
4. The current criteria should not the [population to doctor ration but sickness to doctor’s ration. In India most of the wellness industry is looked after by AYUSH and not by modern medicine, which looks after only the sickness industry
5. The real shortage in India is of specialists and not the doctors. Which can only be reduced by empowering the MBBS doctors in 2-3 years training on the speciality subject weather or not they get post-graduation.
6. In our times there was a requirement of doing six months house jobs in the given subject before starting practice and six months training was sufficient in the given subject or procedure to start practice. MTP act was also enacted with the same assumption of requiring six months training in the required procedure or the subject.
7. To reduce the deficiency in the available specialists in the country we need to go back to the house job structure and make specialists available with 6 – 12 months training. For example if a doctors only wants to go for gall bladder surgery, post MBBS 6-12 months of training in the institution doing only gall bladder surgeries should be sufficient.

Dr KK Aggarwal

President CMAAO and HCFI

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