Sathya Sai Ideal Healthcare - What it Means
Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s vision of ideal healthcare is predicated on six principles. These principles are based on a strong commitment to universal state-of-the-art healthcare.
1. Universal Healthcare: Bhagawan has repeatedly emphasised that state-of-the-art healthcare should be available to all people and especially the poor. In keeping with this commitment, He has established a chain of super-specialty and general hospitals, delivering the best medical care to all. In addition, with His guidance and blessings, healthcare professionals provide free healthcare in over 30 countries.
Doctors should serve the poor with a spirit of sacrifice. There is no greater service than this. As man is the embodiment of God, it is his primary duty to help the destitute and the forlorn. Medicine should not be commercialised. It is meant to promote a heart-to-heart and love-to-love relationship between doctor and patient. A true doctor is one who realises this truth and conducts himself accordingly.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 2003
2. Free Healthcare: Bhagawan has deemed that high-quality healthcare should be delivered free of cost to all patients so that no one is prevented from receiving the highest benefits of healthcare. Every Sri Sathya Sai Hospital and the international Sri Sathya Sai clinics and medical camps deliver such care free of cost to the patients.
Welfare services should be free for all. There are numerous people who cannot afford the costs of medical treatment. Doctors should render free service to such persons.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 1995
3. Loving Healthcare: Bhagawan has prescribed that healthcare workers should deliver this care with love and compassion, thereby elevating the healthcare worker to a healer.
If the doctor is full of love and compassion, God works through him. Doctors therefore have to endeavour to become the receptacles of Divine Power during their healing process.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 1980
4. Comprehensive healthcare: Healthcare includes treatment of the body, mind, and spirit.
Man suffers from two types of ills, physical and mental. They are caused by disequilibrium of the three tempers and three gunas. Physical health is a prerequisite for mental health, and mental health ensures physical health.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 1959
5. Preventive Healthcare: Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba has said that the duty of the physician is not only to treat with love and compassion but also to educate patients in healthy living and thus prevent frequent visits to the physician and hospitals.
The current belief is that medicine is to be valued for its use during illness. But this point of view has to change. Medicine is used to see that one does not fall ill, just as the purpose of truth is to so live that one is not subjected to birth again.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 1980
6. Immediate Healthcare: Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba emphasises that state of the art healthcare should be delivered with love and compassion promptly and immediately to serve the patients in distress.
Sick people must be given immediate medical attention.
–Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 1967