Preventive health care
The best
strategy for a developing country with limited resources is spreading vital health maintenance related information among all sections of people
Bangladesh with a population of over 160 million certainly represents a challenge in providing healthcare to all of its vast number of people. But even the minimum providing of this healthcare --efficiently and effectively-- can translate into great benefits of having a workforce with less or no handicaps from ill health for its members to produce more and efficiently. Thus, greater actual achievements in the health sector ought to be among the high priorities of all governments in this country from now on.
It is not that Bangladesh spends too little as a developing country on health care. The public allocation of resources for health is fairly large given the limitations of the country and different sectors competing for scarcer sources. Over the years, a sprawling network with rural health complexes or small hospitals have been set up all over the country. The major cities are served by bigger public hospitals. The government has been progressively spending greater resources in maintaining such medical and health related establishments. But corruption, poor supervision and lack of accountability are not allowing their users from getting the maximum expected benefits. Therefore, the overall improvement of human health in the country seems to depend very significantly on running these government managed health and medical are centres more efficiently and scrupulously.
The preventive sides to health care also deserve far greater emphasis. The best strategy for a developing country with limited resources is spreading vital health maintenance related information among all sections of people. Thus, regular and intense official publicities need to be geared up so that people can be made aware about what they can do on their own to keep away from illnesses. People can be kept educated about not smoking, taking proper diets, observing thoroughly essential hygiene and maintaining their physical environments safe. These aspects were stressed in a national level workshop on Tuesday and reported in this paper.
From doing of these things alone, a number of serious diseases can be warded off and health of people can generally improve. Furthermore, government should take on major campaigns to increase nutritional awareness. People may learn how to cater effectively to nutritional needs from consumption of cheap but nutritionally rich foodstuffs. Children at schools and workers in factories can be supported with free distribution or sale at nominal prices dietary supplements or nutritious foods.
