In an interaction with ETHealthworld, Preetha Reddy, Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals and President, NATHEALTH, discusses the need to prioritize healthcare by collaborative approach.

As the new president of NATHEALTH, what will be your key priorities in the coming months?Over the course of the next few months, our priorities will be to continue our work towards bringing everyone in the healthcare ecosystem, to a unified platform through integration, collaboration and re-imagination. The road ahead for NATHEALTH is to be a competency centre par excellence for public-private partnerships, nurturing the innovation ecosystem in healthcare and driving new programs to bring in Government support and expanding our aperture. With this vision in mind, NATHEALTH will focus its efforts to bring together all the stakeholders and build the national health agenda.

How important is the need for Government and the private sector engagement in the present times? How is NATHEALTH going to take this forward?The path to achieve a holistic goal of universal healthcare, hinges on collaboration where all the key industry stakeholders come together, deliberate, cooperate and work in tandem to bridge the vital gaps in service delivery. An equally important task is to establish a collaborative platform to coordinate national resilience in the present times, through value based public private partnerships.

As a unified ecosystem, we will sharpen our focus on thought leadership, create new markets and tech access, robust communication, transparency in governance and forge partnerships with smaller organizations and nursing associations, to take this movement forward.

What is urgently needed to revamp Indian healthcare today, in your opinion?It is essential to rebuild trust among key stakeholders, work towards making universal health coverage a fundamental right and creating value for healthcare services. We will make continued efforts to help people understand the valuable contributions that the private health sector makes in handling critical cases and saving countless lives. We need to establish a win-win proposition by fostering partnership models which address healthcare gaps and driving a dialogue that is based on mutual respect and capabilities.

What are the recommendations from NATHEALTH towards collaborative initiatives to address the impact of COVID 19? The healthcare sector is currently tackling the twin challenges of lower productivity due to systemic shock to earnings and major cash flow challenges at a time when COVID-19 needs the entire sector to be motivated and secured as a united front. We believe that the public and private sectors will need to work in partnership to ensure existing challenges are managed better in future and universal health coverage becomes a reality.

This pandemic has made us realize that as stakeholders, the hospitals, med-tech companies, pharma, IT, the medical academia and nursing councils have to join hands, chalk out a plan and work towards it collectively. Collaboration is the way forward.

There is also a need to lay the foundation for building the infrastructure and financial capability with an immediate action plan to tackle such large public health emergencies, now and in the future.

In view of the several challenges facing the private healthcare industry, how does NATHEALTH plan on addressing these issues?Our plan is to actively engage with our four key stakeholder groups: Policymakers, Partners, People and Members to encourage a collaborative approach in addressing these issues. We will work with policymakers to shape industry policies and forge new partnerships with State Governments. We plan to expand our membership base to new markets over the upcoming months to enable smaller and medium healthcare providers to become part of the federations ecosystem, and identify new operating models, technology and knowledge through our members.

Overall, I believe, in order to work towards sustainable healthcare, we have to look at increased public-private partnerships and look at ways to bring the Government, academia and industry together. It is important for us as a nation to prioritize healthcare, bring in increased health investments, scale up medical education and leverage technology to establish much more health infrastructure.

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We need to establish a win-win proposition by fostering partnership models to address healthcare gaps : Pree.. - ETHealthworld.com

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