Sri Lankan State Minister of Trade and Food Security Sathasivam Viyalendiran appealed to the Indian doctors to open their facilities in Sri Lanka offering full-fledged support to give all permissions and licenses to launch good hospitals.
He was addressing a meeting at Vijayawada in Andra Pradesh on Sunday after inaugurating the Golden Hour project by Varun Cardio and Neuro Sciences (VCS), the Sri Lankan minister said that Sri Lanka will cooperate to grant all permissions and if the facility was set up in any city other than Colombo, land would also be allotted.
Expressing satisfaction over the medical facilities available in various private and government hospitals across the state, the Sri Lankan minister said that similar facilities should be made available to the Sri Lankan citizens.
Earlier, Andhra Pradesh’s principal secretary of Medial and Health MT Krishna Babu elaborated on the facilities the State government was providing for the people in the government hospitals.
Underlining the importance of Golden Hour, the immediate treatment in the brain stroke or heart attack would give good results. Otherwise, the patient would be burdensome to the family and society.
A senior Health Department officer told the World Socialist Web Site that 1,000 of Sri Lanka’s 3,700 medical specialists had recently left the country. Applications to leave were increasing on a daily basis.
In a move to slash jobs and reduce government expenditure, the Wickremesinghe government has lowered the retirement age of state employees, including doctors, from 65 years to 60. Sri Lankan doctors currently receiving overseas training are fearful of returning home because of the country’s worsening economic crisis.
To address the lack of medical personnel, it has increased the number of medical students it typically admits to its programmes, and it has installed some economic recovery initiatives with an emphasis on supporting lower-income families, Dr. Manoj Fernando, a doctor and senior lecturer in health promotion at Rajarata University said. .
NGOs such as Save the Children and the Red Cross, as well as UN agencies, have also been stepping up their programming, providing various forms of assistance.
“Sri Lanka’s children will bear the burden of the polycrisis as the ripple effects will impact their futures.”
To tackle the medicine shortages, the Ministry of Health is engaged in a Sri Lanka Red Cross platform called Elixir, which coordinates the needs of various hospitals to then coordinate potential bulk price discounts from suppliers.
The WHO says $8 million is required to help the country purchase raw materials to locally produce essential medicines through the State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation.
