Health care with a vision

Health is the most important asset of any human being and good health is recognised to be among the greatest sources of human happiness. Nationally, the people of a country who are healthy and are able to undertake the gamut of economic activities from their possessing enough vitality and stamina, are considered as fulfilling one of the major requirements for fast economic growth. Bangladesh with a population of over 150 million certainly represents a challenge in providing health care to all of its vast number of people. But even the minimum providing of this health care -- efficiently and effectively -- can translate into great benefits of having a workforce with less or no handicaps from ill health for its members to produce more and efficiently. Thus, greater actual achievements in the health sector ought to be among the high priorities of all governments in this country from now on. Notwithstanding what the public leaders do often claim particularly when they are in power, the realities in the sphere of public health services are far from satisfactory. It is not that Bangladesh spends too little as a developing country on health care. The public allocation of resources for health is not all that inadequate, considering the situation about the availability of overall public resources and also given other limitations of the country including that of competition among different sectors for getting a larger part scarcer sources than what is allocated to them. Over the years, a sprawling network with rural health complexes or small hospitals has been set up all over the country. The major cities are served by bigger public hospitals. The government has been progressively spending greater resources in maintaining such medical and health-related establishments. But corruption, poor supervision and lack of accountability are not allowing their users from getting the expected benefits. In a country like Bangladesh with a vast number of its people living below the poverty line, the reliance on the public health sector for treatment and advice at bearable costs is understandably high. Therefore, the overall improvement of human health in the country seems to depend very significantly on running such government-managed health and medical centres truly efficiently. The preventive sides to health care also deserve far greater emphasis. The best strategy for a developing country with limited resources is spreading vital health maintenance-related information among all sections of people. Thus, regular and intense official publicities need to be geared up so that people can be made aware about what they can do on their own to keep away from illnesses. People can be kept educated about not smoking, taking proper diets, observing thoroughly essential hygiene and maintaining their physical environments safe. From doing of these things alone, a number of serious diseases can be warded off and the health of people can generally improve. Furthermore, government should take on major campaigns to increase nutritional awareness. People may learn how to cater effectively to nutritional needs from consumption of cheap but nutritionally rich foodstuffs. Children at schools and workers in factories can be supported with free distribution or sale at nominal prices of dietary supplements or nutritious foods. The privately-run health care centres present two different faces. On the one hand, world class hospitals and diagnostic centres are coming up in the major cities. Government should encourage this trend by import of hospitals equipment at specially preferential reduced rates and by taxing the entrepreneurs in this field leniently. On the other hand, regulatory activities in relation to sub-standard medical or health centres need to be tightened for the sake of improving the quality of services.