The Hindu : New Delhi News : Charak Palika Hospital to be upgraded

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 21, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

New Delhi

New Delhi

Charak Palika Hospital to be upgraded

Manisha Jha

Casualty, physiotherapy wards to be renovated
Plan to overhaul drainage system in toilets

NEW DELHI: After drawing flak for Charak Palika Hospital’s outdated infrastructure and inadequate doctors in the recent past, the New Delhi Municipal Council has decided to get its act together and prepare a concept plan for improvement of the hospital.

The proposal includes overall restructuring and renovation of its existing facilities in addition to installation of advanced equipment for introduction of orthoscopy and brochoscopy for the first time in the hospital. These will enable specific surgeries to be carried out through minimum invasive techniques.

The hospital’s casualty ward and physiotherapy ward will also be renovated to improve lighting and ventilation. New machines will also be installed at the physiotherapy ward that is under dire need of new equipment.

Public toilets in the hospital are also being renovated to overhaul the faulty drainage system causing leakages.

An NDMC official said: “The 25 toilets in the hospital have not been renovated for the past almost 20 years and needed to be overhauled to plug leakages.”

An ambitious plan to relocate a part of the defunct and outdated building to a modern facility block has also been gathering dust for over two years with the civic body’s architecture department and is now being pursued as part of the up-gradation proposal.

“The part of the building located behind the intensive care unit and below the operation theatre is in danger of collapsing any time. Despite several inspections carried out by the various senior officials of NDMC, nothing has been done so far,” the official said.

“We are planning to demolish a portion of the building which has long outlived its age and reintegrate the remaining part in a four-storey block in the unutilised garden space in the hospital complex,” he added. This block would boast of a modern casualty, gynaecology and paediatric ward along with a new operation theatre.

According to the civic body, several of the problems faced by the hospital were owing to faulty planning which needs to be rectified through restructuring of the hospital building.

Said the official: “The hospital began as a maternity nursing centre in the 1960s and has come up in phases as a 150 bed hospital overtime. Due to this, the hospital has a lopsided landscape with some parts on a slope and some on plain ground. The proposed restructuring plan is aimed at correcting and improving this facet.”

The hospital has also long been bogged down with an acute shortage of specialist doctors and junior and senior resident doctors. At present, the hospital has only 56 doctors including 11 senior residents and nine junior residents, which many believe is too less to cope with the rising number of patients.

“We were facing a crisis as the doctors were being recruited through the UPSC and entailed a lengthy procedure. This process was completed only in May 2007 and in the intervening period we tried to tide over the shortage through employment of doctors on contract.”

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi