India-UK doctors join hands to provide quality affordable healthcare in India

Chennai:

A pool of doctors from India and the United Kingdom are joining hands to provide quality health care to inaccessible areas in India besides collaborating in research and innovation.

The Indo-British Health (IBH) Initiative, which came into being in November 2011 at the House of Lords in London, will be spearheaded by nine trustees and it is believed to attract about 800 subscriptions both in India and United Kingdom by next year end.

A brainchild of joint managing director of MIOT Hospitals

Dr Prithvi Mohandas, who is founder and secretary of the initiative, will have a corpus of Rs 10 lakh initially and will grow on subscriptions.

“We are charging Rs 10,000 for life membership besides Rs 1,000 annually and the aim is to encourage research and provide quality care in far flung areas of India,” he said.

The trust will have three trustees from India and three from United Kindom, who are specialists in cardiology, urology, anaesthologist and other fields. Besides the six trustees, it will also have a secretary, an ex-officio president which will be occupied by deputy high commissioner for UK and a vice-president.

“The IBH initiative will act as a bridge by getting into innovation to provide low cost quality health care,” said Mohandas.

“Poor are being ignored by the private hospitals whose focus is on multi-speciality hospitals to make money and India is importing healthcare products. The initiative will create a spark where India could become a healthcare hub by manufacturing goods at a cheaper cost so that health care would also be cheaper,” he said. To a query on how the rural areas of India will benefit from the initiative, he said the medical fraternity in India lacks support staff and the initiative will work towards this end to fill in the gap.

Mike Nithavrianakis, deputy high commissioner UK for south India, said the private health sector is growing at 15 per cent. He said 285 new medical institutes are expected to be set up in near future, which include 60 medical colleges and 225 nursing schools.