Preserving the tradition of compassion in healthcare |
Healthcare has made astonishing progress in the 21st century: genome editing, AI-aided diagnostics, robotic surgery, personalised medicine. But for the ordinary citizen, perhaps the deepest wound is not disease itself, but its cost. Too often, a family struck by illness finds itself struck doubly by ruinous debt. Hospitals rise as glittering citadels of technology, but their doors open more readily to the wealthy than to the weak. In some, it is said that the billing department is more important than the nursing department. Bills expand faster than hope, and we are left to ask: will the future of medicine be a story of healing, or of exclusion?
This is the danger of a purely corporate presence in healthcare. When profit becomes the compass, ethics stumble into the shadows. We see this in over-prescription, in unnecessary procedures, in the transformation of suffering into “market opportunity”. Can compassion survive in such a climate? Can spreadsheets calculate the tears of a mother, or balance sheets capture the smile restored to a child’s face?
And yet, corporate institutions have one notable advantage: they can marshal immense financial resources to invest in cutting-edge facilities, medical technologies, and advanced research. Many breakthroughs in cancer care, cardiac interventions, and robotic-assisted surgeries were made possible precisely because corporations had the means to build state-of-the-art laboratories, sponsor clinical research, and attract global expertise. This capacity for investment, if rightly harnessed, can complement the missionary ethos and strengthen our healthcare ecosystem. The challenge is not to reject corporate participation, but to ensure that their resources are directed towards equity as well as excellence.
Kerala has a strong public health system: our public (government) hospitals, our taluk and district hospitals and even most of our primary health centres, are adequately staffed and funded to cater to the needs of the vast majority of our people. But they do not boast state-of-the- art facilities,........