If health service in Bangladesh’s hospitals improves sufficiently it could save hundreds of crores of dollars that it spends for medical tourism abroad. According to a New Nation report yesterday, about 800 crore dollars are spent for this purpose annually. Last year in June, Times of India reported that about 54.3 per cent of people visited India from Bangladesh for medical services.
It is not that patients are going to India, Thailand and Singapore for the treatment of very critical diseases, even for a bypass surgery of heart or angioplasty patients are opting for these places. Not all bypass surgery or angioplasty patients, however, go abroad. Only those who can afford these treatments there go. For the relatively poor patients, the bypass surgery or stenting is being done here, and they are also keeping well.
Obviously, there is a trust deficit among the patients on the country’s healthcare service for which about lakhs of them are moving to other countries. Surprisingly in some cases, patients find going to India lucrative because the cost of treatment for many diseases are lesser in India than in Bangladesh.
There are, however, reasons for this trust deficit. First, even the costly private hospitals here have failed to create a patient-friendly treatment environment. Hospital staff, including doctors and nurses, often do not behave with patients with the courtesy and care that they deserve which in countries abroad they get the full. Moreover, if not in all cases, in some cases of course, doctors and technicians in these countries have an edge over their Bangladeshi counterparts in terms of expertise. These edges they have over Bangladeshi health professionals come more from the honesty they have rather than their merits.
During the time Covid-19 pandemic, this lack of integrity got exposed shamelessly. Without testing, at least two diagnostic centres provided test results for Covid-19.
The country’s many of the government hospitals are not for the poor. The government officials get whatever service is available. We shall better without the health ministry. In fact, under a government sycophancy and corruption no ministry works. We do not have any structure of government. Our Major think-tank has now asking the youth learn to reform state structure after fifty years of demolishing state structure. CPD men enjoy fat salaries and no less responsible for not having a state structure for good governance. The CPD does not even know university education has been destroyed for good leaders to come.
