CHENNAI: As the new year begins, health workers and the public are looking forward to vacancies being filled up in government hospitals to improve quality of service and reduce burden on medical staff.
“The government should increase doctors’ strength in hospitals in accordance with patient ratio. Even today, post graduate doctors and house surgeons are doing 24 - 36 hours duty. This is creating a huge stress among doctors,” said Dr G Ravindranath, general secretary, Doctors’ Association for Social Equality.
“Contract employment, outsourcing of manpower and temporary postings should be done away with and such staff should be regularised. The government should make all investigation tests free of cost in (govt) hospitals. After the Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme was implemented, many tests are being charged,” added Ravindranath.
Another demand has been increasing manpower at all levels of government hospitals to improve quality of service and reduce stress among health workers. “There is a shortage of nurses, doctors and other staff at all levels, which is reducing the quality of services. This is a long pending issue and the health department should accept it and address it. Training doctors are still having to work 24 hours duty because of this,” said Ameerkhan, national co-convenor, People’s Health Movement.
“In 2023 around 10 post graduate and MBBS doctors died by suicide or other causes. The worrying fact was that these were young doctors. This is a serious issue and the health department should take steps to prevent these deaths. They should form a Doctors Welfare Board and also offer psychological counselling. Many doctors are stressed due to workload,” said Dr Keerthy Varman, past president, Tamil Nadu Medical Students Association.
“Tamil Nadu should implement the Right to Health policy. It drafted the policy, but did not introduce it. The policy will fix accountability in case of denial of health care services. The health department should also reduce out-of-pocket expenditure for patients,” added Ameerkhan.
“The health department should bring a counselling system and better communication with patients and attendants in government hospitals to end controversies. Of late there are a lot of controversies in the way health care services are delivered at the hospitals,” said Dr N Karthikeyan, State Secretary, Non-Government Service Doctors’ Assn. He added the government should be prepared to tackle any rise in Covid-19 cases with infrastructure, vaccination and testing.