IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/isbchp/978-981-99-4906-9_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Primary Health Care and Resilience of Health Systems

In: Contextualizing the COVID Pandemic in India

Author

Listed:
  • Indrani Gupta

    (Health Policy Research Unit, Institute of Economic Growth)

Abstract

There is now a considerable volume of literature that points to the primacy of primary health care in dealing with pandemics and epidemics. The paper discusses the centrality of primary health care in pandemic preparedness by giving the example of India. It starts by attempting to understand the debate around excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible reasons for this to make the point that it is possible that India saw a greater impact of the pandemic than is officially believed. It elaborates on the current gaps in the existing primary care from four angles: health financing, the capacity of the primary health care system which includes infrastructure and personnel, performance in terms of health outcomes, and equity in terms of access, affordability, and availability of primary care. In this context, the paper looks at the extent of prioritization of the health sector in the three years after COVID-19 started by looking at budget allocations. It concludes that unless the health sector is urgently prioritized in government spending, it is unlikely that the state of primary care will improve anytime soon, with a concomitant impact not only on health outcomes and equity during normal times, but aggravated impact from future pandemics and epidemics.

Suggested Citation

  • Indrani Gupta, 2023. "Primary Health Care and Resilience of Health Systems," India Studies in Business and Economics, in: Indrani Gupta & Mausumi Das (ed.), Contextualizing the COVID Pandemic in India, chapter 0, pages 23-46, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:isbchp:978-981-99-4906-9_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-99-4906-9_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:isbchp:978-981-99-4906-9_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.