A recently-issued government regulation mandates that all specialty and super-specialty doctors of the municipal corporation have to compulsorily serve a service bond of one year in periphery hospitals, with the aim of strengthening the secondary healthcare system. However, this has not been serving any practical purpose, as these specialists and super specialists are being posted in places where neither facilities nor equipment is available, leaving them unable to function.
According to Manisha Mhaiskar, additional municipal commissioner (health), 260 specialty doctors have been taken away from three tertiary care hospitals and placed in 16 periphery hospitals across the city, where their expertise is going to be wasted, due to absence of needed facilities and equipments.
Dr Abhishek Rathi, DMRD, Radiology, Sion Hospital, has been posted at Kurla Bhabha as an assistant medical officer; he has been asked to work in the general medicine department by the authorities at the hospital. Dr Rathi said, “I am more than willing to serve the bond. My only grouse is that I be posted in a hospital that has the facility to optimally utilise my expertise, so that patients can benefit. At Sion Hospital, I used to perform 80 scans a day. I can conduct MRIs effortlessly as well. But here, I don’t have an MRI machine, and on an average, we do 35 scans a month. How can this benefit anyone?”
The idea of enforcing the bond was to improve the secondary level healthcare in the city, but many senior faculty members feel that the step is going to further degenerate the system. In a meeting of Senior Medical Teachers Association of Sion Hospital, in which more than 15 heads of department and 15 associate professors participated, it was unanimously agreed that the decision of sending specialist doctors was not a well thought out one, and could adversely affect patient care. However, Ms Mhaiskar feels that the decision to enforce the bond and send specialised doctors to peripheral hospitals is the “best thing” that could have been done for the city’s healthcare setup. She said, “First we must understand that this a government regulation and we are merely executing it. Having said that, I also maintain that this is an ingenious move. Patients in suburbs always have had to travel to the main centres — KEM, Sion and Nair hospitals — for lack of specialists, but now, with specialist doctors placed at peripheral hospitals, this problem can be taken care of. I will admit that all the peripheral hospitals are not well-equipped, but the idea is to set the ball rolling. Now that we have doctors there, we will equip the hospitals too.”