Upgrade for medical equipment, lab devices

Citing reasons that the diagnostic machine is not working and referring patients to private hospitals could be a passe in government hospitals as the department of health and family welfare is all set to streamline the process.

Under a public-private partnership basis, biomedical equipment and lab devices will be repaired in a shorter span of time, according to officials. Three private players have been identified for the same.

To begin with, all government hospitals in the state will be expected to submit a list of devices they have in their hospitals for the health department to build an inventory. Once the devices are identified, unique barcodes would be given to each of them.

Dr Selvaraj, deputy director, department of health and family welfare said, "The pharmacist and Resident Medical Officers at the district level and nodal officers at Taluk level have been identified to enlist this. They will have to compile data about when the equitpement was brought, manufacturer, supplier, date of manufacture, warranty and the present condition. With this, an update is maintained and immediate repairs can be done whenever need be," he said.

This is being done by the department based on a drive from the National Health Mission. "The idea is to reduce out-of-pocket expenditure. For instance, if an X-Ray machine is under repair in a government hospital and repair takes long, patients will have to go to private facilities and shell out a lot of money. This can be avoided," he said.

Another official in the health department said that this would, however be time consuming as data has to be gathered from over 1,800 Primary Health Centres, 146 Taluk Hospitals and about 18 district hospitals besides 204 Community Health Centres. "Another challenge is also that if the equipment has been purchased several years ago, the documents must be found. At present, there is no uniformity in maintaining these records,"