Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Doctors skip key meets

Thiruvananthapuram: Government doctors stayed away from monthly health evaluation and planning meetings called by the District Medical Officers (DMOs) in several districts on Saturday, as part of their ongoing non-cooperation strike.

In some districts, the meetings were postponed to Monday, but where the meetings took place, none of the doctors turned up.

The monthly meetings are a crucial activity for the public health system. These are called to review the public health activities in the field in the previous month and to plan for the implementation of the programmes for the coming month.

The implementation of all national health programmes in the previous month, including the Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) programme, immunisation, tuberculosis, malaria, blindness control programmes as well as epidemic surveillance, are reviewed at these meetings. Also, these activities for the coming month are planned.

As medical officers are responsible for health planning and ensuring that the targets are met, their absence poses a problem for the DMOs. During last year’s strike too, the doctors stayed away from these review meetings and the impact on the health indices was telling.

If doctors continue to remain off the field, vector-indices monitoring and disease surveillance can be adversely affected, that too with the next monsoon just a month away, a district health official said.

This time around, officials are also worried about how the strike will affect the district-level activities under the National Rural Health Mission. A sum of Rs. 25,000 from the mission was given to each primary health centre in March this year. Unless the money was spent by each centre and the Statements of Expenditure submitted by the medical officers, the State will not be able to claim more allocations from the Centre.

The district officials has set an October 15 deadline for submitting the statements. The State has already received NRHM allocations for the current year, but the expenditure statements for the previous year has to be furnished first.

The government is playing with the lives of the poor by not settling the doctors’ agitation, BJP State president P.K. Krishnadas has said.

In a statement here on Saturday, he contended that even the limited treatment and medicines provided by Government hospitals were not available now.

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