Now More Than Ever: Considering Health System Reforms in the Post-COVID 19 Scenario
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Now More Than Ever: Considering Health System Reforms in the Post‑COVID 19 Scenario Sumit Mazumdar1 Published online: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
As the world continues to reel under the unprecedented impacts of the global pandemic triggered by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that has hardly left countries, regions and populations with their familiar course of life and living, it also provides useful lessons on how public systems can be made more resilient and responsive. An important aspect of the recent experience is to assess how health systems—particularly in low-resourced settings as in most low- and lower-middle-income countries—have responded to manage the highly dynamic, uncertain challenges posed by the pandemic. As in most other key development sectors for large, diverse countries such as India, it is also of prime importance for health systems to be able to strike a critical balance: adapt to the new paradigm of health care needs following from the pandemic through appropriate measures and mechanisms but also remain cognizant of other priorities and commitments across the health sector. This calls for doing more and also doing better, particularly for appropriate stewardship by the government backed by political will. This essay briefly outlines how some of the key learnings in course of responding to the pandemic in India can be incorporated in adaptive reform measures for the health system that aims to ‘build back better’.1
1 Evident Fault Lines Across the Health System Undoubtedly, it is a tough task for any health system to organise, provide, finance and coordinate health services in the Indian context, with its immense regional, socioeconomic, cultural, political and administrative diversities. Researchers and 1 Drawing from the post-disaster recovery literature, Building Back Better (BBB) approaches advocate reconstructing health and other systems in more responsive and efficient ways. A recent paper discusses how BBB approaches need to be integrated with universal health coverage, see https://www.uhc2030.org/ fileadmin/uploads/uhc2030/Documents/Key_Issues/Healt h_emergencies_and_UHC/UHC2030_discu ssion_paper_on_health_emergencies_and_UHC_-_May_2020.pdf.
* Sumit Mazumdar [email protected] 1
Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York, UK
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Vol.:(0123456789) ISLE
S158
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics (2020) 63 (Suppl 1):S157–S162
commentators have observed several challenges around India’s contemporary experience of pursuing goals of positive health outcomes, adequate standards of quality of care and ensuring protection against financial risks arising out of ill-health and medical care, in a manner that prevents or reduces risks of inequity or healthinduced poverty traps. For a country of its India’s size, population density and generally poor public health standards, containing the spread and fatality of an unknown pandemic as COVID-19 has been always a formidable challenge. Although questions have been raised regarding the actual
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