Mission Report: TATA MEMORIAL PLATINUM JUBILEE CONFERENCE

The TATA Memorial Center (TMC) is a national comprehensive cancer center for prevention, treatment and research on cancer situated in Mumbai India. It is a leading tertiary cancer treatment and research center in South Asia. Since seventy years of its existence, this research center has been committed in providing uniform, affordable, quality cancer care throughout India. Like many other Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), India faces many challenges in terms of affordability, accessibility and delivery of specialized care in India. Government of India (GoI) is in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage and therefore it is of high priority for government to improve healthcare planning in India.

Healthcare planning should focus on effectively providing cost effective options of treatments which could be catered to a majority of population. Making adequate use of policy and generating evidences to make informed decisions given the limited resources are one of many potential challenges a developing country has to face. Globally, there has been rise in innovations and new technologies which are expensive. There is also a huge pressure from the healthcare industries to adopt these new technologies. To address this issue, health professionals should make it clear whether they think that healthcare is a commodity or a basic human right and should or should not be accessible to all regardless of who is eligible to pay for it. Around the same concept, TMC organized a Platinum Jubilee Conference with the theme ‘Healthcare: A commodity or Basic Human Need’ on 27‐29 Jan 2017 in Mumbai.

The aim of this conference was to bring together health economists, health policy makers, administrators, epidemiologists, clinicians, and other stakeholder to discuss further on this matter and to discuss various healthcare models across the world and to learn from each other. This conference was focused to create a platform for interaction to achieve an ideal healthcare model which is suitable for developing countries to provide cost effective solutions.

To present on healthcare systems in Thailand, Dr. Somsak Chunharas, Deputy Minister for Ministry of Public Health, Thailand was invited to share Thai experience given his extensive experiences in the field of healthcare. His talk was under the theme of ‘Healthcare systems in selected countries’.