<i>Bridging the gap in healthcare systems</i>
The gap between public and private healthcare services in Bangladesh has been increasing day by day resulting better treatment and comfort costlier leads to the affluent patients to seek better healthcare services from private sectors and often to go abroad depriving 90 percent of the people who go to the public sector.
Whereas little difference is seen between the public and private healthcare service in the many developed countries like Singapore, where a huge number of Bangladeshi patients go only to receive better healthcare service.
Singapore has already turned into a medical hub for the international patients for its quality healthcare, internationally trained physicians, policy and health insurance system that can also be an example for Bangladesh on how to improve its healthcare system and reduce the gap between private and public healthcare service to ensure quality services to all its people.
"There are some hospitals, which run privately from operational side, but the government owns them and government also make the policy. As the difference is little, huge competition is seen among the private and public hospitals that ultimately increase the quality of treatment," said Jason Yap to the Daily Star.
"Difference is seen only in subsidy. From the public hospitals the local patients receive more subsidy than that of the private hospitals or clinics, but the quality is almost same," he said adding "the health sector attracted around 555,000 international visitors to Singapore in last year that was not seen even ten years ago."
"The care in Bangladesh can be improved also by improving the quality of doctors", said Steven Tucker, medical director of West Clinic Excellence Cancer Centre in Singapore adding "75 percent of its local people seek treatment from the public sector as they can obtain quality service from there at a reduced cost.
But in Bangladesh, where 90 percent people seek public health service do not get quality care and medicine. Only ten percent people are able to seek treatment in those private medical centres and buy comfort that shows a clear distinction of the country's prevailing health delivery system, said a group of medical professionals of our country.
Resource-based development in public sector is a must. At the same time equitable distribution of resources and facilities should be ensured to offer better healthcare to everybody, they suggested. "Modern technology, qualified health service providers and health insurance system should be initiated", said former President of Bangladesh Medical Association Prof Rashid e Mahbub.
"As Singapore holds clinical and quality services, excellence, safety and trustworthiness, patients from different countries including Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and even from United States visit Singapore for healthcare service. At the same time it provides one third of Asia's JCI accredited healthcare centres, medical conference and different training programme," said Director of Healthcare Services, Singapore Tourism Board (STB) Jason Yap.
Besides, it has cultural and religious accommodation and acceptance, safe environment, low crime and high security, he added.
Based on exit surveys conducted on international visitors, nearly 10 million patients visited Singapore in 2006. Among the visitors approximately 4,10,000 travelled specifically for healthcare accompanied by further 89,000 persons. Another 56,000 received healthcare incidentally or visit for other purposes.
Singapore, one of the island states in Asia that do not have much farming land, not enough mineral resources even has to import water from the neighbouring country. The economic advancement, education and health services system in this country go hand in hand. We should learn lesson form Singapore to scale up or exisiting poor healthcare services delivery.
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