Chapter Six - Revisiting the efficacy of policies in the Indian primary healthcare sector: Interventions and approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has wracked even the most modern healthcare systems worldwide and has influenced India’s healthcare sector and vastly affected the government’s and corporate stakeholders’ healthcare reform plans; hence, this chapter is intended to unfold the paradigm shift in India’s primary healthcare industry due to the pandemic in the last one and half years. This chapter described India’s experience with the coronavirus during the first and second waves and tried examining the public health difficulties in the COVID era. It provides a timeline of significant events of the pandemic’s growth in India and worldwide and how India responded to the situations through their economic and healthcare policies. We also go through some of the pandemic’s impacts and India’s recovery approach and strategies for its revival. All possibly available secondary data like Scopus, Web of Science, Medline/PubMed, and Google Scholar search engines, newspapers, government websites, etc., were excavated to meet this purpose; secondary sources were used to analyze the data. This chapter also examined the effect of COVID-19 on healthcare workers in India. This chapter critically examined the primary healthcare’s role during this pandemic and the government’s policies and processes to deal with COVID-19 and any other unforeseen situations which the country may encounter in the future.