Health Action to Meet Contemporary Challenges

While India has made rapid strides in building its medical manpower and medical service, yet many of the major health problems are far from being controlled. Although earlier Health problems have not been resolved, newer threats to health through misguided development are getting superadded. The major health threats today are the denial of minimal sustenance base, such as adequate food and water to an increasing number of people. The rapidly increasing uncontrolled chemicalization of body and environment is another health hazard. Experience has shown that health needs cannot be satisfied merely by expansion of the medical industry. Health care work would have to involve an attempt to arrest the growing threats to health and survival, and rebuilding of the ecological base, to ensure provision of basic needs to all.

These efforts would be towards a new economics, because they include radical shifts in food agriculture policy, resources use policy, industrial policy etc and can only be guided by a deep sense of social justice and human concern. Contemporary health care work has increasingly to involve those who are already looking for alternatives e.g. those involved in ecology movements, feminist movement, peace and civil rights groups, those involved in alternative education, agriculture, health care journalism. Priority has to be given and strategies evolved to help add a health dimension, to various health or non health work and initiatives already existing, with a special effort to safeguard the traditional health care knowledge systems from total disintegration. Grass root level feed back should constitute an essential pre-requisite for any (health) policy formulation and its implementation.