Photo Credit: “Who needs to be in an ICU? It’s hard for doctors to tell”, October 27 2020, by TheConversation. Volume 5 Number1: November 2020 Article
Traced back in time, during the Age of Discovery, the pilgrims met with the native Indians when they first set foot on the new world. The natives help out the new settlers to survive in the new world by teaching them how to hunt and gather resources. However, the boat that the settlers brought with them has also brought the disease with them. In exchange for helping the pilgrims, the Indians were gifted with blankets. Without knowing, the pilgrims gave the blanket that contains disease from the rats on the boat. The disease from these heartwarming gifts happens to wipe out around half of the Indians population. With only spiritual practices, the native couldn’t cure the disease and was punished with death. All these fatalities could have been prevented if the Indians have knowledge of vaccines and medicine. Throughout history, many deaths related to diseases or injuries could be prevented if the medical care system was as good as the present time. Even though medical care in the present time is now great and superior in some countries, there are still unnecessary deaths from simple flu or injuries.
Medical care is one of the four basic needs that people need in order to live. All these necessities are what everyone needs but not everyone has access to it. In developing countries, the situation can be clearly seen. Thailand is a developing country that is well known to have the best healthcare ranking in sixth place in the world. According to Bangkok Post (2019), Thailand scored 67.99 out of 100 on the Health Care Index. However, these types of healthcare only exist in some particular area (Houweling, Kunst, & Mackenbach, 2003). The Thai Ministry of Public Health reported that there is an unequal geographic distribution of health resources among rural areas (Yiengprugsawan, Lim, Carmichael, Seubsman, & Sleigh, 2009). In rural areas, when people need services from the hospital, there are not enough staff or doctors to take care of the patient. Even though there are doctors but these doctors lack knowledge. The reason for this problem is that all the resources are centralized in the same area. All good doctors and nurses want to work at a place where they can get high wages. Since all the skilled laborers stay in the hospital in a particular area, all profit will go to this particular area. All the medical supplies will be only available in the centralized area.
In other developing countries, they provided cheap healthcare or sometimes free to the people who were not able to get access to healthcare facilities. For example, in Africa, there are free vaccinations given out to people in rural areas. The project even provides them with free food after every time they get vaccinated. However, the project wasn’t that successful because not a lot of people came to get vaccinated. The reason was that they are lacking education in these basic things. How vaccines work is that you inject a small amount of virus that is weaker than the one that makes you sick to create immunity. Instead, this group of people assumes that vaccines are a magical cure that after injection, they will be cured immediately. When they knew it didn’t work as they imagined, they saw this as a waste of time and money without understanding how the vaccination works. (Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E., 2011)
Private hospitals are well known to be expensive and out of reach of people who have low incomes. Still, there is a substitute which is a public hospital. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the public is bad. Thailand has great public hospitals with great doctors. However, there aren’t enough doctors to treat all the number of patients. This leads to the problem of the queueing system of the patient. Some of the patients have to come and wait since 6 AM and have to wait till 6 PM. Some of the patients must wait for months up to years. The only group of people who can choose their time and date is people who have connections to the hospital or people with powers.
To sum up, the inequalities of healthcare distribution could be found in developing countries. This inequality happens because of the centralization of medical staff and resources, lack of education among the citizens, and the queuing system. To sort out things, the government should have an action plan to help.
References
Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty.
Houweling, T.A., Kunst, A.E. & Mackenbach, J.P. (2003). Measuring health inequality among children in developing countries: does the choice of the indicator of economic status matter?. Int Journal for Equity in Health 2, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-9276-2-8
Thailand’s healthcare ranked sixth best in the world. (2019, September 9). Retrieved November 05, 2020, from https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1746289/thailands-healthcare-ranked-sixth-best-in-the-world
Yiengprugsawan, V., Lim, L., Carmichael, G., Seubsman, S., & Sleigh, A. (2009). Tracking and Decomposing Health and Disease Inequality in Thailand. Annals of Epidemiology, 19 (11). doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2009.04.009
