Candid and Equitable
Diabetes Care: Beyond the
Bounds of Possibility?
By Dr. Supriyo Mukherjee
Published in Medicine Update 2021 Volume 31 – 2021 (Chapter – 55), ISBN-978-81-948742-8-7, Evangel Publishing Pvt. Ltd.
Abstract
The prevalence of diabetes in India is enormous and remained at 11.8% in last 4 years. Approximately 77 million people are living with diabetes while nearly 43.9 million (57%) of the cases of diabetes are undiagnosed. Moreover, challenges such as malnutrition, poverty, and socioeconomic burden precipitated by communicable diseases strain the already burdened health-care system of India. Adding to this, the Indian public health infrastructure can be characterized as chronically underfinanced since 1999. The Indian health sector received only 1–1.5% of the total GDP annually and even less is allocated to public health, health promotion, and awareness campaigns. There is lack of cohesion amongst a plenty of unregulated private centers with varying level of quality, poor coordination and communication, weak referral mechanisms, poor record-keeping, negligible accountability, and transparency which promotes distrust in medical establishment. Therefore, there is large-scale inequity in terms of accessibility and quality of service provision between rich and poor. Potential solutions are private and public sectors, especially public-PCC, need to be strengthened. A strong political will and a robust, evidence-based translational research, a bridge between theory and reality, achieve this beyond the broad structural characteristics of system and make the journey worthwhile for all the stakeholders.