Health and Family Welfare Minister, Ampareen Lyngdoh on Tuesday said that palliative care is an expensive affair but the government of India and the state is well seized of this challenge.
“We are approaching to better diagnostic centres, comprehensive infrastructures to attend to all of these various diseases that cripple the community to the extent of a feeling of helplessness,” Lyngdoh told the House in her reply to a motion on comfort care treatment facilities to patients in government hospitals brought by Mawkyrwat legislator Renikton Lyngdoh Tongkhar.
She said that the state government is strengthening its facilities through the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) scheme and also increasing its secondary and tertiary care hospitalization for such vulnerable populations.
Lyngdoh said that the government is financing and investing valuable funds to upgrade the various health facilities.
According to Lyngdoh the Health and Wellness Centres is a scheme that circles round predominantly over and above the immediate medical attention that a patient may require even if it is not a life threatening situation.
“We are looking at a care which is curative, rehabilitative in nature and we are definitely including the palliative care in the packages we cover for the universal coverage of healthcare for every citizen of the state,” she added.
The Health and Family Welfare Minister said that the state is investing heavily in the non-communicable diseases programme of the state.
She also said that preventive care has to take a presence in all of the government’s activities.
Lyngdoh also said that there is a need to expand the MHIS so that it becomes a dynamic list which is conditioned primarily not by predictable disease that can attend to in the universal coverage but particularly to ensure that whenever the need arises the state health insurance scheme must cover any disease.
The Health and family Welfare Minister expressed concern that Alzheimer’s and Dementia is slowly consuming the population and the way out is to educate the masses to move away from practices used to for so long.
“We have to fight the systemic corruption within ourselves which is detrimental in the long run to the population at large,” she said.
Lyngdoh assured the House that the department will concentrate on early detection, improving the diagnostic centres, increasing screenings and send the state’s doctors for proper trainings.
Meanwhile, Tongkhar who brought the motion expressed concern over the poor families who cannot afford to treat their loved ones and the maximum who are admitted in government hospitals are poor.
He said that when doctors declare that a patient cannot be treated anymore one can understand the emotions going through the family members.
He said that such poor families opt to take the patient back home and such individuals face pain and agony.
Tongkhar became emotional when he mentioned about one such patient who had to be taken back home from hospital and the individual had to suffer pain and agony for months and one fine day he hanged himself.
