Lanka to strengthen healthcare services

Sri Lanka plans to strengthen primary healthcare services to relieve the congestion at hospitals providing treatments at tertiary level as the general public prefers to receive treatment from the tertiary level hospitals. The government says that even though there are around 970 primary level hospitals in Sri Lanka, there is a trend among the general public to bypass this network of hospitals and to move towards the hospitals providing treatments at tertiary level. Due to this trend, a heavy congestion has been created in such hospitals providing treatments at tertiary level. The government says in addition, the need has risen to enhance the local healthcare service due to the increase of the elderly population, growth of non-communicable diseases, dynamic illness patterns among others. The ministry of health, nutrition and indigenous medicine has made a proposal to establish an advanced health service system, to enable the general public to have access to those facilities easily by linking the closest hospitals providing specialised treatmentservices, as forums. The proposal, which has received the cabinet nod to implement the policy providing healthcare services with the objective of universal health coverage, includes identifying one family doctor each to cover per 5,000 of the population and to further strengthen the institutions providing Primary Healthcare services to facilitate the prevention of illnesses, and providing a personal health record to every citizen, with a unique heath identification number and to further strengthen the health information management system among others.