Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on Friday launched Apollo Reach Hospital, an innovative model under the Community Service Programme to take reliable, efficient and accessible healthcare to semi urban and rural areas in Tamil Nadu.
Terming the initiative 'beginning of a new era,' Dr. Singh called on all around participation to provide quality healthcare at affordable cost to unserved and underserved people in the area of health services.
“The challenge of providing affordable quality health care to people in a country like India is complex and can not be left only to the state,” he said.
The private sector should also participate actively and play a dominant role in providing free medicines and high quality specialty hospitals to a larger section, he added.
Dr. Singh said the Apollo Reach Hospital, armed with tele-medicine and integrated technology with the provision of health care, would not only make available the best quality of healthcare to the people but also be an ideal model of how an effective outreach programme can be planned and implemented.
Good health always does not mean medicine and hospitals. It depends on a number of concomitant factors like water supply and sanitation, education, and infant nutrition. And at last the intricate connection between poverty and ill-health is quite obvious, said Dr. Singh.
On September 2, Dr. Prathap C Reddy, the Apollo Group's Executive Chairman had said the Apollo Reach Hospitals would come up in small towns and cities and complement the healthcare services offered by hospitals in the region with modern super-specialty services.
Apollo Reach, as the name suggests, will now reach out to those people in semi-urban and rural areas instead having them come to it, Dr Reddy had said.
He said that 25 hospitals each equipped with 100-150 beds would come up in the first phase within two years at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore. We are planning to set up a chain of 250 super-specialty hospitals in small towns and cities that would provide patients multiple services such as cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, orthopaedics, neurosurgery and emergency and trauma care, Dr. Reddy said.
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