Promoting patient safety in India: Situational analysis and the way forward.

Unsafe healthcare is a well-recognized issue internationally and is attracting attention in India as well. Drawing upon the various efforts that have been made to address this issue in India and abroad, we explore how we can accelerate developments and build a culture of patient safety in the Indian health sector. Using five international case studies, we describe experiences of promoting patient safety in various ways to inform future developments in India. We offer a roadmap for 2020, which contains suggestions on how India could build a culture of patient safety.

Medical regulation in India: an outsider’s perspective.

This personal comment briefly describes the working of the General Medical Council, the medical regulator in the United Kingdom (UK), with the aim of informing the discussion on how to regulate medical education and doctors’ practice in India. Given that the ministry of health and family welfare is still debating the final constitution of the Medical Council of India, this paper is timely.

Doctors and health in India: an outsider’s perspective.

Medical practice in India is under intense scrutiny, and hardly a day goes by without another scandal, about poor treatment meted out to patients, absence of doctors from the workplace in rural areas, fraud in the medical education system, and so on. With rising costs, access to modern medicine is becoming a challenge, and there is little assurance of quality services and patients feel vulnerable and powerless; a real ‘caveat emptor’.