India ranks below Bangladesh on healthcare index

India continues to be one of the poor performers ranking at 154, much below Bangladesh, China and Sri Lanka, in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare, according to the new Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet.

The study points that despite the country`s socio-economic development, India has failed to achieve in healthcare goals and the gap between the score and predicted score has widened in the last 25 years.

Though India`s score in the healthcare index increased by 14.1 points, from 30.7 in 1990 to 44.8 in 2015, it performed worse than expected in tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic heart diseases and chronic kidney disease.

The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, assesses performance for 195 countries from 1990-2015, based on death rates from 32 diseases that could be avoided by effective medical care in the country year-on-year.

India scored an index of 14 in case of neonatal disorders, 26 for tuberculosis, 25 for rheumatic heart diseases and 33 for hypertensive heart diseases. For diabetes, chronic kidney diseases and congenital heart diseases it scored 38, 20 and 45, respectively.

Highlighting growing inequalities between countries, researchers pointed out that even among countries of similar development levels, there is wide variation in healthcare access and quality. For instance, China is far ahead of India ranking at 82 with a score of 74 on the index. Sri Lanka has scored 73 on the index, whereas Brazil and Bangladesh have score 65 and 52, respectively. However, India ranks above Pakistan, which has scored 43.

Source: Times of India