Anita Jain

Corruption: medicine’s dirty open secret

Doctors must fight back against kickbacks

Sex selection and abortion in India

Efforts to curb sex selection must not retard progressive safe abortion policies

Preventing and managing violence against women in India

Requires a systems approach to reforming the culture of the health system

A radical prescription for the Medical Council of India

Hope for a cure

Patient communities reform healthcare in India

Public disillusionment with health service provision has led patient advocates in India to mobilise and push for change, Anita Jain reports

Analysts in India call for urgent expansion of essential medicines list

Public health policy analysts have called for an urgent revision of the Drug (Prices Control) Order 2013 to expand the list of “essential” medicines, whose prices are fixed, beyond the current 348.1 An independent evaluation of the policy by the Public Health Foundation of India and the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development found that this price regulation was limited to 17% of the drugs prescribed in India.2 This left most of the market untouched and provided only marginal financial relief to patients, the authors said. The report was released at a conference on pharmaceutical policies in India, held in New Delhi from 3 to 7 March. The authors recommended increasing the scope and coverage of the price control order, as well as abandoning the current market based formula for drug pricing in favour of a cost based formula. The current policy restricts drug pricing control to formulations that are included in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM). Anurag Bhargava, of the Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences, told the conference, “This is a matter of concern given that the NLEM was not drafted as an instrument for price regulation. It is a representative rather than a comprehensive list of medicines utilised in actual practice. To serve as a reference for rational prescribing, the NLEM includes only a …

Doctors and politics

Promises on a platter. It is election season in the world’s largest democracy and politicians are willing to bend over backwards to woo voters. As India moves decisively towards a new government, we bring to you in The BMJ a series of articles aimed at stimulating discussion on what the general elections should mean for health and healthcare, and hoping to inform the health agenda of the next government. Health has traditionally been relegated to the sidelines with neither politicians nor citizens making a noise about it, when it is indeed central to the vitality of our population. However, it is beginning to climb up the political agenda, reports Patralekha Chatterjee, as she examines how the future of health is carved out in the election manifestos of various …

Going the last mile in child survival in India

It helps to have the right care, at the right time, from the right providers

A fairer world: recognising women’s choices

Has human civilisation progressed since the 18th century? Instances of violation of women’s rights across the world don’t seem to suggest so. The Delhi gang rape in 2012 sparked intense public outrage. It propelled the Indian bureaucracy to reflect on and seek to mend existing systems that a survivor encounters in the quest for recovery, rehabilitation, and justice. A positive outcome has been recognition of the health needs of the survivor, and the introduction of standard guidelines for medical examination and treatment. The new guidelines forbid the two finger test, an archaic examination wherein doctors report on laxity of the vaginal introitus to imply habitual sexual intercourse. Not only is this unscientific, it is clearly irrelevant to the assault, and is violating …

SOS: time to reclaim the air we breathe

Asking for a history of smoking is an integral part of a medical consultation. But has the day arrived when we routinely ask patients about outdoor exposure to air pollutants ? Or given the frenetic pace of urbanisation, do we just assume that most of the population is at high risk? And that the future generation is in for a lifetime’s exposure to potentially lethal toxins, completely beyond their control? When living and breathing come to be, well, risk factors for living and breathing. Inexcusably, we have abused and disregarded the air we breathe, points out a recent study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (doi:10.1136/bmj.g1597). The levels of atmospheric particulate matter and noxious gases in Delhi have risen exponentially in the past decade, …