Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Health officials fix reviews

Thiruvananthapuram: Senior officials in the Health Services, especially district medical officers, are heaving a sigh of relief as government doctors, who had been on a non-cooperation strike over the issue of pay revision, are getting back to work.

The 70-day strike, during which the doctors boycotted field-level health activities, such as immunisation programmes, sterilisation camps and health-planning activities under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), had begun to affect routine public-health activities.

Though the doctors were attending to patients in outpatient clinics, their lack of cooperation for outreach activities had severely cramped functioning of various wings of the Health Services.

The doctors have only declared a temporary withdrawal of strike for four weeks. Officials are hoping that the government will settle the issue soon. The suspension of nearly 80 doctors, most of them specialists, for not reporting for Sabarimala duty had resulted in several primary health centres being closed down.

Now that the doctors have begun to join back for work, officials are busy fixing review and planning meetings, all of which had been disrupted over the past few weeks.

The preparation of local-level health plans under the NRHM had been badly affected by the strike.

The district health administration had been after the local bodies to make them spend the NRHM funds at their disposal for local health action. None of the local bodies had spent last year’s NRHM funds for primary-health-centre-based activities, following which the government fixed a deadline of October 15 to return the statements of expenditure. However, the strike which began on October 1 upset all this.

The funds are transferred to a committee, which has the panchayat president as chairperson and the medical officer of the public health centre as convener. With the doctors declaring that they will not perform any duties related to the mission, preparation of health plans and submission of statements of expenditure in many panchayats had been shelved indefinitely. Speeding up the submission of statements has thus become a priority for all district medical officers, now that the doctors are back in action.

Though immunisation activities have been affected to a certain extent during this period, the government, in between, issued an order that a doctor’s presence was no more mandatory for conducting immunisation camps.

The monthly meetings of medical officers and health field staff, called by the district medical officers, are crucial for the public health system. These meetings are called every month 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 previous two review meetings were boycotted by the doctors. The district-level quality assurance committee is meeting this week to discuss the issue of giving accreditation to private hospitals which conduct sterilisation surgeries. The meeting could not be conducted so far following the doctors’ strike. The District Health and Family Welfare Society, which implements the NRHM programmes, is meeting on December 13 to review the statement of expenditure and revive health action plans.

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