Medicines must for medicines in hospitals

Bhopal, Jan 24: Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has told the officers ensure that medicines must be available at all the medical colleges' hospitals, district hospitals and all other hospitals and all the appliances and equipment including X-Ray machines should be repaired so that poor patients and general patients can get relief. Chouhan was reviewing the activities of Health Department at the Mantralaya on Thursday.

Those present at the meeting included Health Minister Ajay Vishnoi and Chief Secretary Rakesh Sahni. Recently, Chief Minister Chouhan had visited Indore's MY Hospital, Ujjain's District Hospital and Gwalior's Jay Arogya Hospital. During the inspection, Chouhan had found many shortcomings at these hospitals including X-Ray machines lying out of order, unavailability of bed-sheets and lack of sanitation and had issued strict instructions to the officials concerned to give attention to these problems and solve them immediately. Chouhan said that after one month he would once again review the situation of hospitals. For purchase of medicines, orders should be issued three months before.

Chief Minister told the officers to provide adequate funds to hospitals so that benefits of Janani Suraksha Yojana can be extended to women coming to hospitals for delivery. Drugs and medicines must be stored in all the hospitals so that beneficiaries of Deendayal Antodyay Upachar Yojana do not have to purchase medicines from the market. The Chief Minister said that he would continue surprise checks of hospitals in future also. He would not hesitate to take stern action against concerning officials in case he gets complaints about mismanagements and irregularities.

Health Department officers told the Chief Minister that a system of purchasing medicines centrally has been evolved in Madhya Pradesh on the lines of Tamil Nadu. Under the new purchase policy, tenders would be floated at the national level which would facilitate purchase of big pharmaceutical companies at cheaper rates. Now the hospitals would maintain three months' stock of medicines which would ensure that shortage of medicines is not felt at the hospitals. Cold storage system would be established at medicines' warehouse in the hospitals to ensure that medicines are not damaged. Batteries and UPS system would also be installed so that computers can run without disruption. Computerization is getting done by Laghu Udyog Nigam. The software and hardware of the computers would be installed by the month of February.