BHUBANESWAR: Faced with shortage of beds in the periphery areas, Odisha government has decided to set up 12 more sub-divisional hospitals (SDHs), 20 CHCs and 306 PHCs in phases. In order to strengthen the healthcare facilities, the PHCs to be set up in the districts will be of two categories - Day Care PHC and 24x7 PHC. The Day Care PHC will have two observation beds, while the PHCs having round the clock facilities will have six beds.
The decision was taken in the wake of recently issued Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) guidelines to improve the quality of healthcare delivery keeping in view the changing protocols of the existing programmes and implementation of new programmes especially for non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
One of the key recommendations of IPHS is to increase sanctioned bed strength to one bed per 1,000 population and uniformity of the sanctioned beds for similar categories of facilities. Now, Odisha has 0.34 beds for 1,000 population.
Health department sources said more than half of the 377 CHCs will be treated as first referral units (FRU). The non-FRU CHCs would be upgraded as 30-bed hospitals and those who have sanctioned beds of 35 or more will be upgraded as 50-bed CHCs.
Similarly, SDHs will be of 100 beds irrespective of existing bed strength and the number of beds in the district headquarters hospitals (DHHs) will be increased as per the IPHS criteria. The DHH will have at least 500 beds in districts having a population of 20 to 30 lakh, 400 beds in districts of 10 to 20 lakhs population, 300 beds in districts of five to 10 lakh population. Of the 49 other hospitals with six or more beds, nine will be categorised as PHC (Day Care) and 40 as PHC (24x7).
Director of Health Services Dr Bijay Mohapatra said the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), as part of key conditionality for financial incentive/penalty under NHM, has mandated for all states that at least 30 per cent (pc) of public health facilities to be IPHS compliant by end of 2024 and 50 pc by 2025.
“Accordingly, we have decided to set up more hospitals to comply with the norms. The new SDHs, CHCs and PHCs will come up in 20 districts on priority with bed strength of 100, 30 and six respectively,” he added.