Launched amid pomp and lots of hopes the multi-storied Government Hospital-cum-Medical College while facing a series of problems fails to serve the purpose.
Absence of required number of doctors, trained nursing staff, paramedics and technicians on one hand and fund crunch and infrastructural problems on the other are beset with this hospital visited by hundreds of patients not only from the district, but also from Adilabad, Karimnagar and Nanded districts every day.
Poor sanitation, lack of security, acute shortage of safe drinking water and clogging of drains are other common problems in this hospital which is yet-to-be taken up by the Directorate of Medical Education. Non-functioning of all the four lifts turned out to be a bane to the visiting patients and their attendants.
All the four lifts function very seldom and they come to repairs one after another. Compounding their woes the medical laboratories were set up in the seventh floor of the building forcing the patients to trek the flight of stairs to undergo blood, urine and other tests.
“All the four lifts are not functioning and we find it very difficult to take my sister-in-law Anitha who is eight months pregnant to the labs. Toilets and wards are very dirty and emanating stench,” deplores K. Suneetha of Chandrashekar Colony in the town.
Admitting the fact, Resident Medical Officer Dr. A. Vishal said that the OTS people who set up elevators were supposed to attend repairs from time to time.
“We have already booked the complaint. Patients and attendants are not cooperating in their maintenance. When liftboys are absent, attendants in emotion destroy the lifts,” he says.
Above all, inadequate number of doctors is a perennial problem in the hospital.
As per the G.O. No. 150 a total of 250 doctors and 450 nursing staff are required. However, there are 47, and 70 respectively are available at present. The hospital has no regular Superintendent even today after it became the teaching hospital.
Human Rights Forum district president Y.K. Gopal Rao says that the hospital is getting a step-motherly treatment from the government.
There is a board etched with letters ‘24 hour service’ above the drinking water taps outside hospital, but they hardly function for one hour.
Thus, the poor patients and their attendants are facing acute shortage of drinking water, points out Mr. Rao.
A resident of Kurnapally village Rela Ramesh who came with an ear ailment bemoans that facilities at the hospital are not up to the mark.
After hours of waiting, I was examined by the doctor, he said.
