Quality of Ayurvedic health care delivery in provinces of India: Lessons from essential drugs availability at State run Ayurveda dispensaries

Quality of health care delivery primarily depends upon the availability of resources in terms of manpower, infrastructure and material. Ayurveda has beautifully embodied this concern as chikitsa chatuspad (four essentials of health care delivery). In the absence of any one of these, the quality of health care is bound to be jeopardized. The concept of essentials in health care is commonly utilized to analyze the level of quality of service offered at a health care unit. Ayurveda, despite being the pioneer in terms of setting standards of health care delivery in its own time, remained away from such checks in contemporary practices. We have considered here the availability of drugs from Essential Drug List (EDL) of Ayurveda as one of the most basic requirement to assure a quality based health care. The same therefore could have been considered as a parameter of quality check. We have critically analyzed the availability of EDL drugs at State run Ayurveda dispensaries in Uttar Pradesh and found soaring gaps between the recommendations and the actual availability. The study reveals that a large scale ground work is required primarily to identify the drug needs and subsequently to evolve a mechanism ensuring an uninterrupted supply of drugs at primary and secondary care settings in Ayurveda.