Health care and education in India

In this blog entry, I have chosen to focus on the education related to technology and health care in India. India is a large, extremely overpopulated country, supporting over 16% of the world’s population. With the size of the country and the disparities that exist in the health care in India, it is interesting to view how a country handles providing health care to so many people if they do so at all. India is a major world power, and has extremely advanced technology, but their health care is often lacking and they are often unable to provide adequate health care to their billions of citizens. This entry will look at a few articles displaying how education and technology have helped certain areas of medicine and health care improve in India overall.
Although people don’t generally think of India as having a high rate of infection with AIDS, in 2005 reports, there were 5.2 to 5.7 million people infected with the HIV virus according to a BBC news article. Also featured in that article is the extreme drop that has occurred in that figure since 2005. According to BBC News, the figure has been cut almost in half, and is currently closer to 3 million, which it recognizes is still an extremely large figure. According to a press release by UNAIDS, the sharp drop in the number of citizens affected by HIV is a direct result of the Indian government expanding and improving it’s surveillance of the disease. The press release also cites the fact that education and better understanding of the disease helps the government to better monitor and track those affected by the virus. In addition to a better understanding, technology has infiltrated the government’s efforts to help better monitor HIV and AIDS, and they are now using more sophisticated methods of disease detection, including regular blood tests of those at high risk for the virus. The fight against AIDS in India gives us a glimpse into the effects that adequate education and improved technology can have on so many individuals in such a largely populated country.
While education of the government and health care professionals is important, education of the public is also crucial to maintaining health care in a nation with so many inhabitants. By educating the public about health care and disease prevention and care, the number of people needing to visit the area hospitals would presumably decrease and the number of people suffering from various ailments would also decrease due to more awareness of the causes. Two doctors in India, Dr. Aniruddha and Dr. Anjali Malpani, realized the need for public education about health care, and started an organization called HELP (Health Education Library for People), a resource center now housing over 11,000 books on disease and health, along with many other forms of information including pamphlets and magazines. More information about the resource center can be found by following this link: . The doctors realized that by educating the public, many serious medical problems could be prevented before becoming so serious a problem that patients would require intensive medical care that many facilities in India may not be able to offer. The resource center is located online, and this is a clear display of how technology enters into the field of medicine and affects the education that the public receives about their own personal health care.
Another aspect of education and technology in medicine that is important to understand, is the education and training of health care professionals in India, particularly the nations physicians. While I won’t delve into the complexities of the curriculum in medical colleges in India, I will point to a few problems discussed in an editorial by Rita Sood and BV Adkoli entitled, “Medical Education in India- Problems and Prospects.” Namely, the article discusses the lack of clinical experience that students gain while studying in an Indian medical school. Medical schools in India often concentrate solely on medical science, and assume that students will be able to use that knowledge to practice successfully in a clinical setting. However, as this article points out, that is not something that one can assume of every student. In addition, the lack of updated technology in medical teaching units makes it difficult for teachers to deliver the information and clinical applications in ways that are most beneficial to the students. Updating the technology available to students and teachers in medical schools throughout India would help physicians trained at those hospitals to finish with a better understanding of medicine as a practice rather than just a science.
While India is not one of the countries that many people first think of related to disparities in health care, such a large population makes it difficult for the country to provide adequate health care and education to its people. In future posts, I will come back to India as well as Africa and other areas of the world, and delve into other aspects of health care and technology in these areas so that by the end of the semester, each of us has a better understanding of the state of health care and it’s use of technology around the globe.