“There is a need for proper planning and strengthening the healthcare system where both the pandemic and these other treatable diseases can be managed simultaneously,” Dr Mikashmi Kohli told me recently. “We now have diagnostic tools which are multi-disease platforms so focusing just on COVID-19 , while forgetting about patients suffering from these manageable diseases, will only lead us in the direction of a failure.”
One of the main consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the neglect of the treatment of other diseases and disruptions to health systems. I spoke with Dr Kohli – a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University – on a range of topics. We discuss how COVID has disrupted health systems; how other diseases are being neglected; and the work we need to do to strengthen health systems going forward.
“We can’t just think unilaterally,” Dr Kohli told me earlier this month. The disruption “has been a problem of a broken healthcare system and it is imperative to start fixing that.”
Source: Health Issues India
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