An Empirical study on the importance of Task Shifting in current Health Care System

Abstract

Many developing countries are facing a crisis in human health resources due to a critical shortage of health workers. Despite of many trained health care professionals our health caresystem is struggling to provide optimum services to the patients. Gaps still exist with respect to patient care, which are unevenly delivered. The data collected from 228 subjects reveals thatonly 7.01% of the subjects have received counseling always, 59.65% think that counselingshould be given and only 41.66% are satisfied with current health care system while 56.57% arenot satisfied. Our study shows that there is a huge burden on health care professionals due to ahigh number of the patient load which leads to the hindrancein optimum patient care and finallyleads to the degradation in the quality of health care services. Now time has approached whenthe term task shifting should be taken seriously especially in the health care sectors. Pharmacists,an ignored profession in the health care sector have a crucial role for optimum patient care. It isthe demand of the scenario that pharmacist should be taken as a key role player between thepatient and prescriber. A proper communication between the patient and prescriber can be established only if all health care professionals will start working to assist each other not tocompete with each other.