E-Paper
India's ageing population needs a new health care blueprint
This article is authored by Dr Upasana Arora, managing director, Yashoda Group of Hospitals.
India is undergoing a major demographic change, leading to changing health care needs of the nation. Until now, our health care system has been focused on battling serious issues like child and maternal mortality, infectious diseases, and access to basic health care. At present, India is experiencing a paradigm shift in health care. The increase in longevity has led to a demographic shift, which calls for innovation in how we care for our ageing population. The country is expected to have a sizeable elderly community of almost 230 million individuals aged 60 and above by the year 2036. The rise in life expectancy often comes with cases of chronic conditions, frailty, cognitive impairment, and mobility restrictions, often layered on top of one another in the same individual. Caring for older adults, therefore, requires a different approach, one that moves beyond treating individual diseases and instead focuses on continuity, coordination, prevention, and preserving quality of life.
India has already made encouraging progress by expanding health care access through several national initiatives and improving financial protection for hospitalisation. At the same time, health care providers across the country are beginning to demonstrate what comprehensive elderly care can look like in practice. Indian institutions, be it public or private, have recognised that healthy ageing cannot be achieved through episodic treatment alone. It requires a dedicated ecosystem where medical care, rehabilitation, nutrition, mental wellbeing, palliative support, and caregiver guidance work together to address the complex needs of older adults.
Comprehensive geriatric care begins with understanding that no two older adults age in the same way. Many leading players in India’s health care ecosystem have built the kind of model that can be considered as a norm for elderly care. It starts with a comprehensive geriatric assessment of a patient's medical, cognitive, nutritional, and functional health, because in older adults these are rarely separate issues. The care extends into chronic disease management for conditions like hypertension, heart failure, and COPD; dedicated memory and cognitive care for dementia and Alzheimer's; and fall-risk assessment and bone health programmes, since fractures in the elderly are often the beginning of a steep decline in their overall health. Along with this, careful medication review is one of the most under-recognised risks older patients face, as multiple prescriptions can quietly compound into new complications.
Technology is also helping hospitals bridge gaps that distance once made impossible to close. Remote patient monitoring now allows chronic conditions to be tracked well beyond a clinic; similarly, digital cognitive assessment tools make it easier to catch early signs of decline before they become emergencies. Integrated electronic records let a cardiologist, an oncologist, a rheumatologist, a nutritionist, a geriatrician, and a physiotherapist coordinate care for the same patient, rather than working in silos.
None of this is complicated in concept; what the country needs now is treating geriatric care as a separate discipline. This would mean training more geriatricians, embedding preventive screening into primary care rather than tertiary hospitals alone, building long-term and home-care infrastructure that doesn't yet exist at scale. Further, insurance coverage needs to expand beyond hospitalisation alone to also cover the ongoing management.
The health care programmes in India have proved that an entire ecosystem can be reshaped when the government and people work together. The next test is whether we can build better infrastructure for geriatric training, home care, and chronic disease management.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Dr Upasana Arora, managing director, Yashoda Group of Hospitals.
