Dear Reshmi and Khomba:
I read with great interest your story in the May 21 edition of The Economic Times titled "Doc's in, for now, but Escorts awaits cure for malady".
A few years ago, in India and especially the metro cities, there were fewer hospitals than there were patients and doctors and the latter, unless they were grey-haired with experience or top notch, were not well paid. Business houses that stepped into healthcare realising its lucrative potential in India, due to a growing middle-class and nouveau riche which rose with myriad heath problems due to the complexity of life and lifestyles and had bundles of cash in hand, changed this scenario.
I am sure that there are many well-known doctors, and I have closely observed one to whom I had shown my parents last year, who have moved from one hospital to another privately-promoted one assuring the owners of good business and hence negotiating a great emolument package with the surety of the doctor's large number of patients moving where he or she goes.
The biggest malaise today is that healthcare and many of the doctors who provide that have become highly commercial. One small indicator is the time that a doctor gives to a patient in a first time meeting or successive ones. Let us not pass the buck on to the explanation of there being too many people to see. An observation from a person who writes on the manufacturing sector makes one find an amazing similarity between how a quick throughput time is maintained to ensure that more material gets processed on the shopfloor for greater profit and the number of patients one sees in a day.
Dr.Trehan is very good in what he does but there is no doubt in my mind that he is as astute as any businessman like Shivinder Singh.
It's very rare that two business people, in the same business can get along. The only difference being that Dr. Trehan also wears the hat of a doctor, a profession that is driving healthcare passionately as a business as much as business people are steering their hospitals.
Sincerely,
Taarun Dalaya
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