Jubilee Post News & Views
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh health department’s plan to run health camps every Sunday at all Primary Health Centres (PHCs) has hit rough weather even before the idea could see first such camps.
The government doctors, and other medical/technical staff, who are responsible to run the camps, have said this will deprive them of their ‘weekly holiday’ and also restrict them from doing their family responsibilities.
The Diploma Pharmacist Association, Uttar Pradesh, is a body of thousands of pharmacists working at government hospitals across the state have written a letter to the office of principal secretary, medical and health demanding holiday instead of working at the health camps every Sunday. The doctors still maintained that instead of Sunday the camp shall be held on any of the working day within the week.
Having said that, it means if two pharmacists are deployed at each of the 3,500 PHCs for camps it means, about 7000 of them will need a holiday in one of the working days, in the following week. “The camps will benefit people in a big way and pharmacists are ready to cooperate in it. Since the pharmacists will work on Sunday hence they be given holiday next day to fulfill their responsibilities towards the family,” the letter from pharmacist association said.
The Provincial Medical Services Association, body of government doctors has met the senior health officials to find out a workable solution for this addition responsibility. PMSA has not opposed the Sunday health camp (Mukhya Mantri Arogya Mela) but they (doctors) want these camps to be run on working days and not on Sundays.
The government order dated December 31, 2019 was sent by the chief secretary to all divisional commissioners, district magistrates, additional directors (health department), chief medical officers and heads of different hospitals, laying out the plan to organise “Mukhya Mantri Arogya Mela” at all PHCs and also Urban PHCs.
The aim, the letter asks is to bring health facilities close to people so that general health condition of people should improve. The camp should have four doctors, para-medical staff, resident doctors from nearest medical colleges and other facilities from AYUSH department also.
Dr Amit Singh secretary PMSA said, we are with the government to ensure better health facilities but working on Sunday means no holiday. As our working hours are not decided so the doctors already work with a 24-hour routine. In such a condition if doctors are made to work on Sundays also the morale of doctors will come down and also the routine services might be adversely affected.
Also read: https://jubileepost.in/en/virus-gripping-chinas-wuhan-have-reached-other-countries/
Giving statistics of vacancies Dr Singh said there are 18,348 sanctioned posts of doctors but only 11,000 are working while the remaining posts are vacant, hence, the overload can be understood. There are 3500 PHCs in the state hence running health camps on Sundays will require over 10,000 doctors on Sunday.
PMSA president Dr Sachin Vaish said, “working on Sundays will result in to mental pressure upon the workforce as apart from OPD there are other duties too like postmortem, emergency. If workload is increased in such a manner then how can the jobs in government hospitals motivate others to join and in such condition how would new doctors join them?
Priyanka Saigal
