Paediatric Cardio-Care

According to the Pediatric Cardiac Society of India (PCSI), the prevalence of congenital cardiac anomalies is one in every 100 live births; or an estimated 2,00,000 children are born with CHD every year. Only 15,000 of them receive treatment.

In India, services for baby and neonatal cardiac care are provided by 22 hospitals and fewer than 50 centres.
These centres are also not evenly dispersed geographically. According to an AIIMS cardiology department report from 2018, 70% of these centres are in South India, and the majority of them are found in areas with lower rates of CHD.
For instance, eight facilities in Kerala provide newborn cardiac procedures for an estimated 4.5 lakh births each year.
The populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which are anticipated to have 48 and 27 lakh births annually, respectively, lack a centre equipped to perform neonatal cardiac surgery.

With 1.4 billion people living in 600 districts, there are only 250 paediatric cardiologists on hand. In a country with a half a billion people, the doctor-to-patient ratio is atrocious.
In 2019, there were 2,966 paediatric cardiologists in the United States, or one for every 29,196 people, according to the Annals of Pediatric Cardiology publication.
In addition to the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Punjab, and Odisha have higher CHD prevalence rates but lack government-employed paediatric cardiologists.
Four paediatric cardiologists serve the 38 government hospitals in Delhi. Currently, paediatric cardiac care is provided in Jaipur (Rajasthan), Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Madurai (Tamil Nadu), Bhubaneshwar (Odisha), Palwal (Haryana), and Indore (Madhya Pradesh), primarily in the private sector.

Source The Hindu

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