Dr. Devi Shetty, cardiac surgeon and entrepreneur, while speaking at the Republic Summit 2024 spoke about the importance of universal health insurance as well as the great scope of Indian healthcare. While explaining the importance of health insurance and technological development, he spoke about how India has the potential to be the production house of global doctors.

Changes under the current government

Dr. Shetty spoke about the contribution of the current government in prioritising healthcare in India. He said that it took 70 years to build 55,000 medical seats and the current Government managed to double it in the last seven years. This has happened for both undergraduate seats and post-graduate seats.

India looks beyond just Indian requirement

Dr. Shetty said that India cannot look at just the country's requirement to produce doctors. While an American doctor does not work in England or other countries, Indian doctors are happy to work anywhere. He mentioned a British medical journal article from Howard supporting his stance. “ The American patients who are treated by Indian doctors live longer than American patients who are treated by American doctors. This is the brand which India has as healer of the world”.

Medical colleges in India

Dr. Shetty spoke about how India can produce 70,000 more doctors every year by just adding 100 seats to the existing medical colleges. This will work because the current medical colleges have acres of land, which can be used for pre-clinical work. For clinical work, they can adopt a government hospital. According to Dr. Shetty, this can be done with very little investment.

One problem he said that people point out is the shortage of faculty. Dr. Shetty believes that changing the definition of what faculty means will help these colleges deal with that problem as well. The top surgeons in India should be allowed to teach surgery in the medical colleges.