: It seems general medical practitioners have almost become an endangered group of medical professionals as junior doctors are not interested in setting up a clinic on their own. In the last fifteen years, the city has hardly had any clinic or nursing home, says N. Madhu, national executive, Qualified Private Medical Practitioners and Hospitals Association. Instead, there have been a slew of corporate hospitals that have opened in and around the city.
Specialisation has become a trend not just as a profession; it has also become a kind of status symbol among doctors. Laymen, too, are wary of a doctor with just an MBBS degree, says Dr. Madhu. Consequently, those going in for specialisations would prefer to join an institution.
N. Gopalakrishnan, a general practitioner at Mupathadam and the founder member of the General Practitioners Association, Kerala, says that the choice to have an independent clinic is a tough one now. The trend has led to the concept of a family doctor becoming a thing of the past, says Dr. Gopalakrishnan.
Family doctors form the base of the medical care pyramid and the absence of the primary healthcare professionals in the private sector could perhaps be one of the prime reasons that had burst the bubble of the Kerala model of healthcare, he added.
“It has become a risky affair as the consumer laws and the Clinical Establishments Act make a single-doctor clinic rather unviable,” says Sunny P. Orathel, immediate past president, Kochi branch, Indian Medical Association. Actually, the absence of a proper system in healthcare had resulted in people going for consulting specialists, says Dr. Gopalakrishnan. In effect, the medical care costs had gone up for consulting specialists and undergoing unnecessary diagnostic tests for an ailment, he adds. But the consumer laws against the medical professionals are also responsible in some way for the downtrend of the family doctor, he says.
