Dr Devi Shetty, Indian Heart Surgeon on Money, Health, the Price of Life – Listen to This, Seriously

The west needs to learn lessons from modern Indian healthcare:

Despite the “hard” probing by the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, Devi Shetty puts forward a strong case for the “industrialisation” of healthcare in an effort to reduce costs, increase access and improve quality.

So much of what he says cuts against the emotional grain of how people feel about how healthcare should be provided – especially for those of us in the warm embrace of our publicly-funded systems.

The numbers are staggering: India needs to do 2.5 million heart surgery procedures a year – currently capacity is at 90,000.

Shetty is building a huge hospital in the Cayman Islands to offer healthcare to Americans at half the price they can currently access. Extraordinary, but even more extraordinary is what he is doing in India and planning for Africa – training is the key thing – he is calling for a global health university. Really, he’s a visionary…

My favourite Shetty quote: “You invest in healthcare, and you are going to make a country healthy and wealthy”.