So here is the bitter truth. Your Chief Minister is in a foreign land getting treatment for a mystery ailment that his voters and the State should not know. Your Power Minister suffers a sudden health condition and undergoes a ‘successful’ surgery in another State. And Your Health Minister promises you super specialised healthcare. Isn’t something strange, something amiss here? When our Ministers don’t trust the Goa Medical College and our Health Minister would like GMC to compete with the private sector in those areas of healthcare where facilities already exist, isn’t that misplaced priorities?
The general defence is that the wards and the hospitals are ‘cleaner’, the hospital during this government is better. What begs to be answered is why are we not making our primary health centre services self-sustainable, our Goa Medical College a basic specialised centre where the existing departments have staff with training and people handling skills and doctors a reason to return back to? Instead, the Health Department seems to be aiming more to compete with private sector healthcare in order to pay a few specialists and oblige insurance companies rather than upgrading its traditional staff and consultants to higher levels of healthcare. For a change, the Health Minister could give a facelift to GMC. In his endeavour to get more and more specialisation, Goa’s highest health policymaker is pandering more to commercial interests than the promise of world-class healthcare at the grassroots level.
But that isn’t the only bad news that Goans will have to battle it out for another year in succession. A couple of days back, the results of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for MBBS admissions for 2018 were announced. Over 7 lakh students out of 13 lakh who appeared have qualified to join MBBS courses in various medical colleges across the country including GMC. Horrifyingly, the minimum percentage required for admissions this year will be 16.53% for unreserved category and 13.33% for reserved category students. The dangerous trend means that even students with a lower percentage of marks will be eligible to get admission for MBBS. You may wonder how does it affect you if students becoming doctors get into medical colleges with less cut-off percentage. Here lies the answer. Last year an estimated 2 per cent of those who qualified with such low percentages opted for private medical colleges with much better facilities and well trained and exposed facilities than GMC. One shudders to think that if students with lesser percentage are opting for better equipped and trained medical faculty, who will be coming to study at the poor teaching facilities of GMC.
One must not forget that the Health Minister is from the same political party that wants to make all Ayurveda and homeopath doctors, allopaths or doctors of modern medicine by a three year bridge course (Health Minister Vishwajeet Rane who wants his Department to make advanced healthcare affordable to Goans is yet to make his stand clear on his Central Government counterparts’ bizarre scheme). Health Minister has also been seen to play partisan against private healthcare soliciting specialists to kill Goa’s once nationally awarded and recognised healthcare system.
As a senior healthcare consultant in the State well caps it, “What did we expect? People were bound to move away from the medical profession. With a relentless attempt to discourage doctors at all possible levels that is restrictive legislation, baseless criminalized treatment, overenthusiastic sealing of hospitals, ever increasing terms of internships reminiscent of slavery bonds, absolutely insensitive political class and judiciary on violence against medics, increasing reservations and tireless attempts to keep medical enterprise unprofitable, this was incoming for long and is just the beginning. Ultimately, a society gets what they truly deserve”. This one chilling statement is reminiscent of female foeticide in India. If you kill the girls who will the boys marry? Likewise, if Health Minister and his party’s national healthcare policies kill Health Education and Healthcare systems, who will treat your ailment? After all, not every Goan is CM to fly to the USA for treatment or fortunate enough to suffer a brain stroke in a metro like Mumbai to undergo excellent surgery.
