Does rural India need a new primary healthcare delivery model?

Abstract

There has been a continuous downfall in equipping the Primary Health Centres (PHCs) with infrastructure, facilities, and workforce to provide basic minimum primary healthcare services to the underserved population in the Indian context. The main goal of this research is to look at the infrastructure and manpower in a sample of PHCs in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The interview template exclusively for Product-Service System (PSS) by Singapore University of Technology and Design-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SUTD-MIT) was used to study randomly selected samples of 51 PHCs. The data were examined using the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) of the Indian government. Some of the key findings included the lack of workforce and their commitment, shortage of space, electricity, and water supply. To find a solution for the found lacunae, this article also discusses about the functioning of Mobile Hospitals (MHs) depending upon the contexts and thus extracting lessons for a new intervention in the primary health care system delivery model. Finally, a new healthcare delivery model in the form of a mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) is proposed based on the field study and the synthesis of historical literature on MH.

Keywords:

• Primary healthcare services
• disaster management
• mobile primary health centre
• patient-centred care
• mobile hospital

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to PMRF Scheme, which is under Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India (GoI).

Ethics approval

This study involves human participants only for qualitative interviews after taking verbal consent from all the participants. Participants data/biological material was not involved in the study. This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. The Institutional Ethics Committee has confirmed that no ethical approval is required.

Data availability statement

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article. Qualitative interviews were reported as a summary.

Authors contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and Design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by both the authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Declarations

Consent to participate

Verbal informed consent was obtained prior to the interview.

Consent to publish

The participant has consented to submitting the information they provided during the qualitative interview to the journal.

Financial support

Not applicable

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Md Haseen Akhtar

Md. Haseen Akhtar is Prime Minister research fellow in the Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. He obtained his BArch (Bachelor of Architecture) from National Institute of Technology, Trichy; Master of Design in Industrial Design from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and currently pursuing PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He was Gold Medallist of BArch (2015–2020) and a recipient of the Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship 2023–2024 at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, and BIRAC Biotechnology Ignition Grantee Fellow 2022–2023, India. His research interests include healthcare infrastructure and services design, information design in healthcare, and architectural design. His research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals, presented at several national and international conferences, and he has five patents and design copyrights.

Janakarajan Ramkumar

Dr. Janakarajan Ramkumar is professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. He obtained his BE (Production Engineering) from National Institute of Technology, Trichy, and MTech. and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai. His research interests include micro-electric discharge milling, micro-electro-chemical milling, excimer laser micro-machining, abrasive flow finishing, magnetic abrasive finishing, fabrication of composites, and machining of composites. His expertise is also evident in the field of healthcare ranging from primary healthcare innovation, intensive care unit innovation, and biomedical devices innovation with over 100 patents and design copyrights. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals.