The Hindu : New Delhi News : 'Dream project' hanging fire

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 22, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

'Dream project' hanging fire

By Bindu Shajan Perappadan

NEW DELHI, JUNE 21. It is a 24-crore project that just does not appearing to be taking off. With the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital authorities being given yet another date for completion of the multi-speciality state-of-the-art trauma centre by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), administrators at the hospital claim that the state of the project has become a matter of serious concern.

The project was conceived way back in 1999 as a one-stop centre for all trauma cases in the Capital. The foundation for the same was laid in 2001 and work on the project began in June 2003. At that time, CPWD gave October 2004 as the completion date and this was later postponed to December 2004. And according to the latest reports, the deadline has now been shifted to March 2005. This even as the trauma centre at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is yet to take off despite having a proper building and facilities in place.

Speaking about the delay in completion of the trauma centre, the Medical Superintendent of RML, N.K. Chaturvedi, said: "It is our dream project and will have state-of-the-art infrastructure with specialisations such as orthopaedics, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, maxilla-facial and cardiac surgery. There will also be support services such as MRI scan, CT scan. The foundation stone was laid in December 2001 at a function attended by the then Health Minister, C.P. Thakur, and the then Urban Development Minister, Anant Kumar, who promised that the construction would be over in nine months. But the CPWD which is building the centre started setting new deadlines almost from the very beginning."

And mid-way through the project, things did hot up with the Union health secretary taking a serious note of the delay and top Health Ministry officials intervening but then things slowed down again. On an average, the RML Hospital alone gets 25 to 30 head injury cases requiring specialised care. Because of its centralised location, the hospital also gets a lot of reference trauma patients managing whom can become very difficult in routine wards.

The RML's trauma centre project is to be built over an area of 9,001 square metres and the building would be a seven-storey structure. It will have 70 beds and a staff of 288 people including a chief medical officer, computer programmers, senior residents, junior residents, OT staff and technicians. The recruitment process is already underway and so is the procurement of the equipment. "The ground floor will have a 12-bed ICU with a police room and X-ray facility. The centre is likely to have 11 beds in the ICU unit and 20-bed wards with nursing stations on the fourth and fifth floors. There will be three operation theatres, an investigation centre and an intensive care unit besides conference rooms and other facilities," said Dr. Chaturvedi.

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