World Family Physician Day: Ahmedabad faces shortage of family doctors

On the occasion of World Family Physician Day (May 19), a glaring healthcare gap comes to light in Ahmedabad – the city, with an estimated population of 7.5 million, has just around 1,000 registered family physicians.

Despite being considered the backbone of primary healthcare, the presence of family doctors in Ahmedabad has seen a steep decline over the years. Once central to neighborhood and household healthcare, family physicians are now becoming a rare find in the city.

Today, approximately 85% of doctors in Ahmedabad are consultants, while only 10–12% are working as family doctors. This marks a dramatic shift from the 1980s and 90s, when 80–85% of doctors were family physicians.

Earlier, a family physician in Ahmedabad often treated multiple generations of a family and maintained a personal connection with patients. They were trusted with understanding not just individual medical histories but also the social and psychological backgrounds of families.

However, with the rise of multi-specialty hospitals and corporate healthcare systems, the personalised family doctor model has gradually eroded, leaving a large section of Ahmedabad’s population with limited access to continuous and affordable primary care.

Local healthcare experts express concern that Ahmedabad’s growing dependency on consultants may burden hospitals unnecessarily and make healthcare less accessible to the urban poor and elderly — groups that traditionally rely more on family doctors.

With a population boom and rising lifestyle diseases, experts stress that strengthening the family physician model could be key to reducing long-term healthcare costs and improving public health outcomes in Ahmedabad.