The Development Committee of the Vadakara District Hospital has decided to reconstitute the organisational structure of the trust that was formed earlier to coordinate the activities of the Dhanwanthari Dialysis Centre (DDC) and the Dhanwanthari Dialysis Nidhi (DDN) — both launched in 2013 with a mission to care for poor patients suffering from renal diseases.
A decision in this regard was taken at a district-level meeting chaired by district panchayat president K. Jameela as complaints arose from various quarters of the “conversion” of the public undertaking into a private trust. It was the Vadakara Taluk Development Committee (TDC) that first expressed concern over the attempt and called for the intervention of district panchayat authorities.
As per the new decision, the trust will function under the headship of elected people’s representatives.
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The chief patron of the trust will be the MP from the Vadakara Lok Sabha constituency. MLAs from the Vadakara, Kuttiyadi, and Nadapuram Assembly constituencies will be the other patrons.
Earlier, the TDC members had come up with a complaint that the people’s representatives and local body members from the region were hardly aware of the decision taken by the Vadakara Hospital Management Committee to bring DDC and DDN under the control of an independent trust.
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According to them, around Rs.3 crore had been collected from various sources to meet the treatment needs of the patients through the initiatives and it could not be handed over to an independent trust.
Some of the TDC members had also said that there were several instances in which the public initiatives were slowly converted into trusts, later falling into the hands of a few individuals. It should not be the case with ‘Dhanwanthari,’ they had said.
Soon after the complaints surfaced, the TDC had appointed a senior revenue officer to look into the steps taken to form the trust and the mode adopted to select its members. The officer had also been asked to collect details from the Superintendent of the Vadakara District Hospital on the details of the organisational structure.