Doc dearth cloud on upgrade

- 1800 vacant posts could hurt Mamata's super-speciality plan

SANJAY MANDAL AND PRANESH SARKAR

Calcutta, Dec. 25: Severe shortage of doctors could come in the way of Mamata Banerjee's plan to upgrade 27 hospitals in 11 backward districts.

"Around 1,800 doctors' posts are vacant. Of these, 800 are specialists' posts and the rest are general duty medical officers'," a health department official said.

Sources in the department said the specialist doctors would form the core of the super-speciality hospitals Mamata wants to build. "There is already a shortage of doctors. When the 27 hospitals are upgraded, more doctors will be needed," the official said.

"The crisis is so acute that the health department is often forced to transfer specialists from one medical college to another ahead of inspections by the Medical Council of India," he said.

Mamata announced yesterday that the Centre had sanctioned Rs 610 crore to upgrade the hospitals.

The plan is aimed at stopping the flow of patients from the districts to the medical colleges and hospitals in Calcutta. Of the government hospitals in Bengal, only the medical colleges now have super-speciality status.

A super-speciality hospital must have cardiology, cardiac surgery, neuro medicine, neuro surgery, urology, nephrology, gastro-enterology, oncology, and plastic surgery units. These departments need specialist doctors. The district hospitals that will be upgraded only have general medicine, general surgery, gynaecology, orthopaedics, psychiatry, dermatology, ophthalmology and ENT wings.

Shymapada Basak, the director of health services, said: "We are trying to fill up the vacancies but there is a dearth of orthopaedic surgeons, radiologists, cardiologists, cardio-thoracic surgeons and anaesthetists in the state."

The health department recently announced that specialists would be recruited from other states but the plan is yet to take off.

The sources said the state's financial crunch was one of the main reasons behind the posts lying vacant for years. "The situation has become such that if one specialist retires, we cannot replace him with another," a Swastha Bhavan official said.

The shortage of general duty medical officers, who provide primary care in the state-run hospitals, would also pose problems for the upgrade project.

Some health officials, however, said the crisis "will be reduced by the time the hospitals are upgraded". "From this year, we have increased the number of medical seats by 1,000. So we'll get more dotors. It will take two to three years to upgrade the 27 hospitals," an official said.

There is a shortage of paramedics and group D staff too. The sources said 2,500 group D posts and 1,500 posts for paramedics were lying vacant.

The absence of students at the upgraded hospitals could pose another problem. "At the medical colleges, post-graduate trainees, interns and house staff take the bulk of the daily workload, from maintaining patients' records, to doing night shifts and examining patients at the OPDs," a doctor at a medical college in Calcutta said.

The health officials, however, said the upgraded hospitals would be linked to medical colleges. "They will be the satellite units of the medical colleges. So students will be able to work there," the official said.

But a section of officials pointed out that it "would not be feasible for medical college students to work in other hospitals".