Dearth of equipment, medicine, docs hit treatment at hospitals

The Comptroller and Auditor General report placed in the Delhi Assembly on Tuesday said a severe dearth of essential equipment, medicines, adequate staff, beds and even patient trolleys were obstacles for treatment in Delhi government hospitals.

The Comptroller and Auditor General report placed in the Delhi Assembly on Tuesday said a severe dearth of essential equipment, medicines, adequate staff, beds and even patient trolleys were obstacles for treatment in Delhi government hospitals.

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The report says hospital infrastructure is not equipped to handle the number of cases, which hindered treatment .

Most of the big hospitals of the city had not spent the entire amount allocated to them for human resource and infrastructure upgradation during the past three years. They had instead been persistently saving funds for machinery and equipment, supplies and material and salary.

The hospitals surveyed included 500 or more-bedded hospitals such as GB Pant, Lok Nayak, GTB, DDU and Ambedkar among others.

“… indicates insufficient procurement of equipment, medicines and shortage of staff. Due to inadequate number of registration and pharmacy counters and shortcomings in their compuetrisation, hospitals fail to handle large crowds… The emergency departments were not providing required services… Laboratories and diagnostic services were found wanting on many counts,” the report said.

]The hospitals, however claimed, given the patient load and the bureaucratic hurdles they had to face, they tried their best to maintain and provide top quality healthcare.

“We get around 7,000 OPD patients, 2,500 in-patients and nearly 500 emergency cases in a day. The infrastructure is inadequate to meet the current needs. Still we try to do our best,” said Dr Rajpal, medical superintendent, Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital

According to the report, the shortage of doctors in big hospitals was found to be between 13% and 36%, while shortage of nurses and nursing staffs was as high as 42% in the GB Pant super-specialty hospital.

In response, Delhi health minister AK Walia said more than 50% of the patients that Delhi hospitals catered to were from outside Delhi. “We try not to turn away patients if we can help it,” he said.He said manpower and medicine procurement systems had been streamlined.