E-Paper
PGIMER to soon take a call on ending tele-consultation
With the PGIMER resuming its walk-in facilities, only 500 to 600 people are getting tele-consultation in the hospital daily while the count was over 3,000 two months ago
The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) may soon take a call on discontinuing the tele-consultation facility in order to scale up physical consultations at its out-patient department (OPD).
The daily tele-consultations have already dipped by around 80% in the past two months after the institute reopened the physical OPDs with prior appointments and walk-in registrations.
At present, only 500 to 600 patients are getting OPD consultations through phone calls per day while the count was over 3,000 in September.
Meanwhile, the number of people attending physical OPDs in PGIMER is increasing every day. But the daily footfall of patients is yet to match the pre-Covid times.
On an average, more than 6,500 people are availing physical consultations in the OPD daily. Before the Covid started spreading, over 10,000 patients visited PGIMER’s OPDs daily.
In the last 10, days (from November 8 to November 17) as many as 59,042 patients have attended the physical OPDs in PGIMER, while consultation on phone was given to only 5,304 patients.
Since the suspension of walk-in consultation and online appointments in March last year, the institute had been providing OPD services only through tele-consultation. The physical consultations had resumed on June 21 this year, but only after prior appointment through tele-consultation, until walk-in OPDs started on September 27.
“The institute had revised its tele-consultation registration timings to 10.30am to 11.15am from 8am to 9am. Since patients do not get satisfied with the consultations through phone, they prefer to visit the hospital to meet doctors. Since the starting of the walk-in OPD facility, the tele-consultation registrations are dropping. From over 3,000 per day, the count had come down to 1,500 in October and then further dropped to 600 in November,” said Dr Surjit Singh, director, PGIMER.
He added, “In the next few days, we are expecting tele-consultation numbers to drop further. Soon, we will take a call on discontinuing this facility so as to bring back the patient facilities like pre-Covid times. Besides OPDs, we are also focusing on doing maximum elective surgeries to provide best treatment and care to the patients.”
‘Online registrations will also be scaled up’
The PGIMER director also said that the facility of online registrations for the institute’s OPDs will be scaled up and cap on the daily numbers will be relaxed to streamline the flow of patients. “We will also look for increasing the online registrations so that people can make advance booking to consult the doctors at PGIMER, that too with their own convenient time,” he added.
For physical consultation through the institute’s official website, PGIMER is at present allowing 50 patients per department and 100 for three major departments — ophthalmology (eye), hepatology (liver) and internal medicine.
