Asian Perspectives on Health and Quality of Life

Among the Asian countries, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan have made significant advancements in promotion of health and improvement in quality of life of their population. No doubt, Singapore and Hongkong are equally important in this context, but they are very small countries for comparison purposes. The experiences of some of these countries will be very valuable for promoting health programmes in other sister Asian countries like India. However, availability of data is a hindrance and therefore, comparative perspectives on health from a few Asian countries have been attempted in this unit. They include China, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Bangladesh and India. Among these, except India and Bangladesh, the other five countries have progressed considerably, in many aspects of health promotion. As you go through this unit, you will realise that India and Bangladesh are lagging behind in most of the health profiles. Therefore, contrasting comparison of health perspectives in these seven countries of Asia gives meaningful and representative information on Asia in general. 

The discussion is focused on available data on various dimensions of health among these countries, which include: GNP spent on health, medical care as percentage of total household consumption, access to safe drinking water, doctor- population ratio, access to health services, access to sanitation, coverage of immunization, care of pregnant women and children by trained personnel, low birth weight, daily calorie intake per capita, infant and childhood mortality, maternal mortalitv. longevity. communication technology. adult female literacy rate as percentage of males and contraceptive prevalence. All these aspects together will provide the profile of health and quality of life of populations in developed and less developed Asian countries. 

Objectives 

After studying this unit, you should be able to : 

• list the policies and programme aspects related  to health promotion in selected Asian countries
• compare the health status, epidemiological transition and mortality levels among seven of the major Asian countries 
• discuss the nature of inputs in health promotion programmes and 
• assess the level of quality of life in terms of (a) Communication technology (b) Education of women (c) Calorie intake (d) Contraceptive prevalence rate, and (e) Life expectancy.