The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research has failed to provide any respite to the patients visiting the tertiary care institute for treatment, despite tall its claims of modernised and computerised modes of treatment.
The patients are usually from far flung areas of the region who have to suffer the wrath of gargantuan queue, only to fetch their test reports and if a patient is prescribed more than one test, they experience living hell.
Geeta Chauhan, a patient said, “I boarded a bus from Yamunagar at 5 in the morning to reach PGI. Around 7:30 pm I went to the dermatology department to get my blood report, but there I got to know that the report will be available from research block-A. When I approached the person at the designated counter, I was told that my report has been dispatched to new-OPD and I can receive it from counter number four in the new-OPD building.”
However her ordeal didn’t end here. She reached the new-OPD building by 9 am and when this reporter met her, it was 2 pm and she was still standing at the end of a serpentine queue. Angry Geeta retorted that PGI is famous for the sake of it, but at the grass root level the institute provides worst services to the common patients.
Time and again the issues have been raised before the PGI authorities about the plight of the patients, but they brush them aside by attributing it to the high turnout of patients from the region and the poor health care facility at the ground.
However, an annual audit report prepared by the director general of audit narrates a different tale. For the benefit of the patients and to save them from the cumbersome task of standing in queue to procure reports, the PGI was to start a Hospital Information System Project. This project was to be completed in three stages in the year 2008-09.
According to the audit report, in March 2007, a contract was signed between PGI and C-DAC to carry out computerisation at PGI. According to the terms and condition of the contract, first phase of the project was to be completed on March 24, 2008, the second phase by September 24, 2008 and the third and the final phase by March 24, 2009.
It is 2014 now and the first phase is still far from completion. The PGI didn’t levy a penalty on the company for breaching the terms of the contract but on top of it paid around Rs 11.62 crore to C-DAC in the year 2013. It is clearly mentioned in the report that despite non compliance by the company, PGI has paid it the amount.
Six years have passed since the deadline, but not even a single stage into the project is fully functional. The contract for completion of the project was given to C-DAC Company, and according to the terms and condition of the contract a penalty was to be levied on the company failing to meet the deadline. According to the audit report, by now the penalty amount is around 7.14 crore out of which not a single penny has been recovered by the PGI.
Meanwhile, in the name of computerization, PGI has only been able to provide the reports prepared by the Bio-Chemistry lab on an internal server, but even these reports are made available to the patients through counter number four in the new-OPD building.
To get the report, patients have to stand in long queue as earlier, and a staff at the counter prints the reports for distribution, after entering the CR number of the patients in their system. In a nut-shell all the money spent for the benefit of the patients have flowed down the drain and a patient seeking the report is back to square one facing long queues.
In the initial phase of the computerisation project it was planned that the reports will be made available to the doctors on their systems directly, but after all the gung-ho over the affair the, net result was zero.
In 2011, the matter of non completion of the Hospital Information System Project was brought forth the PGI authorities. A committee was formed to look into the matter, but after three years now the committee is just a sitting duck which have not budged an inch.
The callousness and recklessness shown by the PGI in the implementation of the project has resulted in the plight of the common and poor patients who visit the institute with a hope only to get despair with long due queues, but the PGI authority has always blamed it on the volume of patients instead of looking into the flaws in their own system.