Delivering Healthcare

Reflection/What I learned: The video begins with interviews with various Indian people explaining the unfortunate things that have happened to them, people who have died of many diseases, giving birth, and more. It discusses the extremely ineffective ways that the ill are dealt with. In many cases, the sick aren't even aware of what disease they carry. "Blind faith" is discussed. It is the belief that diseases are the doing of demons or evil spirits (or something like that) and that religious practice can cure them. It causes people to believe they don't need treatment. It's highly common. The discussion then moves to the fact that many of the citizens don't know whether doctors are trained professionals or not. The fact of the matter is that they aren't, in fact, many doctors or medical "professionals" are fairly undertrained, uneducated, and have very little knowledge/experience about their job. 41% of doctors have no medical degree and 17% have not graduated high school. These "doctors" try to do a wide range of things to patients, (administering shots, drips, etc.) that are not only ineffective but may even cause more harm. The problem for the poor becomes that they get to the hospitals to have themselves treated, but they're too poor to afford all of the tests that they administer at the hospitals. When surveyors visited government subcenters, they were closed 56% of the time. Therefore the government subcenters are a very unreliable source of help. Very little people use them because of this (also money). As the video concludes, all of the reasons listed above are large contributors to the very poor health care system in India. 

How it relates: This specific video doesn't relate back to my paper about Sudan as much as the others have, simply because it is a video directly about health care in the country of India. However, some of the things that occur in the video can possibly be related to the situation in Sudan that I wrote about in my WFP paper. Within India, there are multiple causes of the terrible health care system. Though health care wasn't the topic of my paper, government was. Government (if it's powerful enough) is able to create and regulate implementations such as health care. If a Sudanese federal (or multiple local) government(s) we able to do this, it could create longer life spans for Sudanese people, and healthier individuals altogether. If longer life spans were acquired, then farming would be able to occur longer throughout lives, and more food would be produced. If people's health was overall just better, they could most likely farm with a lot greater efficiency and generate higher yields. Therefore, more food!