provide space in their hospitals, where a private clinical service provider will set up the radiotherapy centre to treat patients at a cost agreed with the state”.
According to Kakkar, Varian has also approached the Central government to draft a policy document for the establishment of radiotherapy centers based on the PPP model. He said, “This model will help address the issues of the geographical skew in terms of access and availability of facilities.” According to him, only less than 100 of India’s 718 districts have radiotherapy facilities. These results indicate that only around 18 to 20% of patients are able to get radiation therapy.
In comparison with the global average of 1.84, India has only 0.45 linear accelerators or radiation programs per million people. Additionally, Kakkar claimed that there is a severe shortage of radiation oncologists, who are required to provide services in this specialized cancer therapy. He noted how this shortage affects patients. He said, “This lack of radiotherapy systems and manpower gets compounded due to inadequate infrastructure, causing patients to travel long distances to access treatment, which eventually forces most of them to drop out”.
