The Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Medical College in Sanathnagar here will be the model based on which two new teaching hospitals are to be upgraded in Alwar (Rajasthan) and Bihta (Bihar).
A two-member committee consisting of ESIC board member K.K. Agarwal and Hyderabad Medical College dean M. Srinivas — nominated by the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment and ESIC Head Quarters in New Delhi — had already visited the two places, looked at available infrastructure and decided on steps to upgrade for making them fully functional.
“Both places already have a 500-bed hospital each, fully equipped and constructed on par with the best medical colleges but they have been used only optimally for the past four years. The plan is to tone up the health facilities within the next six months,” said ESIC sources.
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The two colleges have digital classrooms, laboratories, auditorium, sports facilities, hostels and staff quarters sufficient to run a medical college with an intake of 100-150 students annually. The renewed effort to improve the medical colleges on the lines of the Sanathnagar college (affiliated to the KNR University of Health Sciences-Warangal) is thanks to the fact that their novel initiatives in the past four years got noticed.
Spread over an area of 30 acres, the college here has been upgraded to 470-bed hospital and an additional super speciality back-up with 150 beds for taking up complicated cases. Here, all the services, including tertiary care, are available on a single campus for insured persons.
The hospital drastically reduced referrals to other hospitals from 20,000 in 2016 to zero last year while patient attendance went up from 2,500 to up to 4,000 per day improving laboratories, outpatient services, etc. A referral committee monitors validity of all referrals online with patient biometrics so that only genuine cases are approved, they informed.
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There are 14 operation theatres running in parallel, reducing waiting time for patients and about 16 super-speciality departments were developed which helped reduce the referrals and plans are afoot to run a round the lock dialysis centre. The college has been among the first medical colleges to go for Aadhaar-Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS) and officials say this has led to immediate impact on service improvement and thereby, patient care.
The AEBAS and the online recruitment process with 60 parameters has been made applicable to other colleges with the Sanathnagar institute made the nodal centre for recruitments to all other colleges. “We became the first ESIC medical college to fill up 100% insured people and also secured the highest number of distinctions among all the medical colleges in 2019 in Telangana. We have made our 400 students adopt hospital beds for regular interaction with patients,” explained dean Srinivas.