Need for Laboratory Infrastructure in India

Dr Ravi P Singh, Secretary General, Quality Council of India (QCI) talked about the issues and concern of Indian lab infrastructures at BW Healthcareworld Diagnostics Summit 2019 in association with BW Businessworld in New Delhi.

With the help of some statistics during his special address, he leveraged his talk in which he said, ”There are around 5 lakh laboratories in India and during the survey, it was known that 20 per cent of these labs is supported by multi-speciality hospitals and the rest of the labs are standalone ones.”

Such available data on pathological labs in India raises a question on the authorities who are regulating these laboratories in India and where do they get their accreditation? To this Dr Singh said, QCI has presented this very concern to National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL).” In solution to the above mentioned, he added, “We along with NABL are looking ahead to work in this direction to bring out the quality laboratories in India and improve the quality of healthcare as well.”

Healthcare is a growing market and one of the major contributors in this sector is the diagnosis. This is impacting the GDP of the country by 2-3 per cent but we look ahead to grow up to 10-11 per cent with 375 million dollars by 2025.

Another biggest concern that Dr Singh spoke about was the preventive medicines and pre-defined normalcy in various pathological tests as it was defined decades ago. Talking about a recent report published in a leading English newspaper, where FDA has defied the cholesterol issues and they need to update their decade-old research.

Dr Singh said, “ We cannot depend on the age-old US research in the field. And If we leverage international research, we can’t support Indian researched data.”

Coming back to the issues related to Indian Laboratories, he added,  “There’s a huge demand of infrastructure but we can’t do it on our own. We foresee to work with NABL to overcome this issue soon.”