Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Monday chaired a review meeting on the shortage of specialist doctors, performanace of civil hospitals and other issues under the health department.
Speaking to reporters, Health Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh said that the meeting was basically to evaluate the performance of the civil hospitals and district hospitals across the state of Meghalaya. The government had reviewed the positions, the performance and the requirements of infrastructures.
“We are giving ourselves about 24 – 36 months and we will evaluate the performance accordingly,” she said.
She said the most critical requirement in the government hospital was the issue of human resources. “The CM is now informed about the shortfall of paramedical staff, shortfall of specialists and medical doctors. This evaluation was done with the purpose to ensure that we are able to track the performances of all of our hospitals.”
“We will await for another interaction with the chief minister to see what are the other areas and what are the financial inputs that government will be taking to ensure that our health system improve substantially,” she added.
Lyngdoh also informed that the department had also submitted a comprehensive proposal on how to ensure specialist doctors join government services in Meghalaya.
“We must have adequate incentivisation so that has been decided and officials will now go back and plan various proposals or packages to offer to these specialists so that we are able to fill up all vacancies in the specialist category,” she said.
She also added that there is a big gap in the medical officers (MOs). “We are well aware of the fact that we as a state are suffering greatly from this crunch of medical doctors. The average coverage of MOs is 60-70%. So we now are going to review all these deficiencies and we will be able to bring out more attractive packages for the doctors,” she said.
Lyngdoh further informed that the government has decided to come up with a policy to ensure everyone in the health department should have a compulsory difficult posting.
“We have decided to incentivise services of health personnel across the state of Meghalaya. You will notice that in very far flung places of services provided to the public via the health department, there will always be resistance by health personnel across the board. So we are looking at the initiation of a policy that will firstly ensure everyone in the system in the health department must have a complusory difficult posting,” she said.
Lyngdoh said everyone in the health system should not for example take recluse to the fact that we do not have provisions for housing of the health personnel whenever they are posted out.
“We have evaluated the scale of all health personnel and we have seen that there are provisions for acquiring of housing facilities for doctors, for nurses.
We hope that we will be able to evaluate ourselves. This is a self assessment before any third party comes, government should be ceased of what are the potential, weaknesses, strengths of our own services,” she said.
Meanwhile, the health minister informed that the government will also for further detail researching on why is it that referral of patients is a common practice in all the government hospitals.
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