Which is the priority?
How to get both on track?
Dr. P K Sasidharan
Many people in India are unaware of the priorities in health care.
Palliative care and transplant are not the priorities at the moment.
A robust primary care with trained family doctors is 10000 times more important for the voiceless sections of the society which constitute the majority.
Even palliative care will become effective only when we have trained and competent primary care doctors in large numbers.
Palliative care volunteers are not substitutes for good primary care doctors.
To spread palliative care effectively we need adequately trained family doctors sitting in all PHCs.
The focus should have been debating on how to improve the primary care and Kerala should set the model for the rest of the country.
Palliative care is needed for incurable diseases.
The focus is now only on attempting to cure the incurable diseases and in the palliative care which should be offered by primary care set up.
Palliative care integrated into primary care alone will work effectively.
For that we need large numbers of trained family doctors.
Unfortunately we do not have enough motivated and competent primary care doctors and hence we need more and more palliative care volunteers.
The focus should shift to preventing diseases and promoting health and reducing the disease burden with competent family doctors.
