Assessment of Future Manpower Requirements in Public Healthcare of India and its Northeastern Region

Abstract

Health-care workforce planning is crucial for active healthcare provision and to achieve an improvement in population health. One of the major challenges in the quest for achieving the goals of the Universal Health Coverage is the shortage of skilled health workers which is a matter of concern for health planners. The paper attempts to project the future requirement of allopathic physician practicing in public sector for India and Northeast India using the health information data from the Datanet India (Indiastat). The projection of physician was done using the average doctor to physician ratio for the year 2004–2017 and population projection was derived using the average exponential growth rate. Study found that with the current trend, India and Northeast are still far from meeting the healthcare needs of the population and the shortage of allopathic physician in public sectors will continue to persist in future. Under the current scenario, India will have require close to 1.6 million public sector allopathic doctors in 2030 to keep up with the WHO standard population to physician ratio. Northeast India will need 0.05 million to achieve the same standard. It could be expected that public health workforce in India and Northeast will remain insufficient in the future and this may have serious implication to the poor and vulnerable section of the population and therefore calls for a need to have a strong build-up and development in Indian health-care system.