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The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared the National Health Policy, 2002, which envisages a hike in health sector expenditure, mandatory two-year posting in villages for doctors, revival of primary healthcare system and an increase in spending on public-funded research.
The policy, cleared on Wednesday at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seeks to increase the health sector expenditure to six per cent of the GDP.
With the planned increase in public health investment, the Central government's contribution in this sector is set to rise to 25 per cent from the existing 15 per by 2010.
The policy lays stress on the revival of primary health system by providing some essential drugs under Central government funding through the decentralised health system.
It also recognises the need of levying reasonable user-charges for certain secondary and tertiary public health care services for those who can afford to pay.
The policy seeks to make a two-year rural posting mandatory before awarding a graduate degree to a doctor. This would not only make trained medical manpower available in under-served areas, but would also give valuable experience to the graduating doctors, it says.
To enable fresh graduates to contribute effectively in providing primary health services, the policy identifies a need to modify the existing curriculum.
A need-based, skill-oriented syllabus, with a more significant component on practical training, would make fresh doctors useful immediately after graduation, it says.
The policy envisages an increase in government funded health research to a level of 1 per cent of the total health spending by 2005 and up to 2 per cent by 2010.
Research programmes taken up by the government in drug/vaccine development would be conducted in a mission mode, the policy says, adding time-bound applied research for developing operational applications would also be undertaken.
The new health policy aims at regulating minimum infrastructure and quality standards in clinical establishments/medical institutions by 2003.
It also seeks full operationalisation of an integrated disease control network from the lowest rung of public health administration to the Central government by 2005.
The setting up of this network would include installation of data-base handling hardware, IT inter-connectivity between different tiers of the network and in-house training for data collection.
PTI
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