Doctors must ensure benefits of knowledge to poor: Shekhawat

New Delhi, Feb 16: Vice President Bhairon Singh has urged doctors to ensure that benefits of their knowledge and research reached a large number of people, including the poor and deprived, by making quality healthcare affordable.

Inaugurating the South Asian Neurosurgery Conference here last evening, Mr Shekhawat stressed the need for policies and actions which make healthcare affordable to the poor and deprived besides creating a culture of compassion and sensitivity amongst the doctors and other healthcare professionals.

The Vice President said the major challenge was to provide affordable health care to a large segment of people living below poverty line with attendent problems of disease, malnutrition, illiteracy and ignorance. Pointing out that these people were denied the right to live with human dignity, he stressed the need for making right to quality healthcare a human right as advocated by nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He asked doctors not only to acquire professional excellence but also to remain sensitive to the health needs of the common man so that people gained faith in them.

In the present times of fierce competition and life full of stress and anxiety around 450 million people across the world were affected by neuro-psychiatric disorders, 121 million people suffered from depression globally and 50 million from epilepsy, he said.

South Asia alone had 11 per cent of the burden of disease due to neuro psychiatric conditions, the Vice President pointed out said that these staggering figures posed a great challenge to the doctors to fight against growing complexity of the neurological disorders and diseases.

He said medical sciences had rapid progress leading to the development of sophisticated procedures for treatment of ailments affecting sensitive organs. So, the doctors needed to update their knowledge, surgical procedures, diagnostic techniques and research skills and methodologies to keep pace with the advancing nature of diseases and their chemistry. He said the four-day long Conference would help in making neurosurgeons professionally up-to-date.

UNI