As early as in 1961, the Mudaliar Committee in its report had also recommended to the government for the formation of a central healthcare cadre. IMS would provide efficient health care managers to enhance the success of health projects and formulate policy, and the course of action for fighting diseases. COVID has exposed the lack of coordination and collaboration between the public and private sector in view of the inadequacy of health facilities. IMS could be a game-changer. It is a matter of record that such a service exited in British India.

IMS would bridge the gap between decision-making and delivery. IMS cadre could hold health-related administrative responsibilities at the district level, state and national level. IMS will be responsible for holding the administrative responsibilities pertaining to the district medical officers, project officers of various disease control programmes, and the various ranks of secretaries in the Union health ministry and the state health departments and the heads of all other areas in the health sector.  Basic qualification to be eligible for the IMS examination should be MBBS, and the exams can be conducted like other UPSC exams. Terms of service conditions, posting, recruitment, and other criteria can be similar to those applicable to the IAS and IPS. It is not that the government is not seized of the issue. In fact, successive governments have looked at this issue, but there has not been much progress on this front so far.

The plight of individual doctors in India though is not hidden from anybody. While the government has not been able to improve its public sector hospitals, it is trying to pin all responsibilities on doctors.

Successive governments have been ignoring public health due to a deficiency of doctors in government hospitals. Instead of improving the public health sector, the governments have been trying to put the responsibility of public health on shoulders of private doctors.

For these reasons, an exodus of doctors to other countries is taking place, which is further deepening the crisis of brain drain.

IMS can help in curbing many ill-factors such as policy-implementation gap, brain drain, violence against healthcare professionals, and medical education by helping formulate guidelines and laws to curtail many of these ill-factors.