After more than three full months of India stories, I figured it was high time I share some pictures that hopefully illustrate the true task at hand. Come along for a look inside Indian hospitals, some of which are the best of the best, the Johns Hopkinses or Mayo Clinics of the country.
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| Hospital bed tower |
A coworker asked me what I thought after seeing one of the hospitals. I knew he was asking about my opinion from an operational sense: what did I think of seeing patient rooms that housed not one or two patients but 60 - aren't they more efficient from a space standpoint? And how about the way outpatient clinics were run - no appointments, just show up and wait?
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| Queue for outpatient department at 8:30am |
I didn't - and couldn't - give an answer about care delivery. Everybody has their opinions on how to take care of the sick. While I also have an opinion, I could only offer emotional reactions, not operational assessments. To tour these facilities is sobering, heartbreaking, inspiring, overstimulating, frightening. And while I won't say I think the US system is perfect, I will say that after seeing the general state of Indian facilities, we have a lot to be thankful for.
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| Trauma unit, Emergency Department. |
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| Outdoor hallway to other hospital departments. |
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| Waiting room for Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. |
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| Inpatient ward. |
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| Treatment room. |
And just to make the contrast a little more stark...
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| Private patient room, US. |
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| General patient ward, India. |
2 comments:
This is a great commentary, perhaps not so much on the Indian healthcare system as upon the American healthcare system. Let us hope and pray that we do not lose the system that so many have worked so hard over so many years to provide to us.
I am looking forward to your return so that we can sit down and, as Cal said in the "Titanic", you can regale us with your stories.
Very interesting. Thanks for the photo hospital tour. I work in health policy, specifically comparative analysis and mostly within Europe. There are so many different metrics upon which a system can be compared and so many adjustments that must be undertaken so that a fair comparison can be made. Comparisons with the US are difficult because it is such an outlier on spending. But there are metrics that we don't do so well on, like infant mortality.
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