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India's Healthcare Has Improved Over The Years But It Ranks Below Bangladesh And Sri Lanka: Study

There's a long way to go.
A woman carries her niece who got sick after consuming contaminated meals given to children at a school.
Adnan Abidi / Reuters
A woman carries her niece who got sick after consuming contaminated meals given to children at a school.

Despite making giant leaps in medicine, India continues to be at the bottom in the ranking of countries in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare.

According to the new Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet, while South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China and the Maldives have seen some of the greatest improvements in healthcare access and quality since the 1990s, India has failed to achieve most of the healthcare goals.

India ranked at 154 in the list of 195 countries.

Meanwhile, the study shows that even among countries of similar development levels, there is wide variation in healthcare access and quality.

China is far ahead of India ranking at 82 with a score of 74 on the index. Sri Lanka has scored 73 on the index, whereas Brazil and Bangladesh have score 65 and 52, respectively.

The study for India shows that the gap between the score and predicted score has widened in the last 25 years.

This map shows the Healthcare Access and Quality Index (HAQ) values, by decile, in 1990.

This map shows the Healthcare Access and Quality Index (HAQ) values, by decile, in 2015.

Over the years, the country has seen improvement in the healthcare index. It had scored 44.8 in 2015, up from 30.7 in 1990. However, the report shows that the country performed worse than expected in tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic heart diseases and chronic kidney diseases.

India scored an index of 14 in case of neonatal disorders, 26 for tuberculosis, 25 for rheumatic heart diseases, 33 for hypertensive heart diseases and 20 for chronic kidney diseases.

"By measuring healthcare quality and access, we hope to provide countries across the development spectrum with valuable data on where improvements are most needed to have the biggest impact on the health of their nation," said senior author Professor Christopher Murray, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, USA.

Globally, the index increased from 40.7 in 1990 to 53.7 in 2015.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.