With the State administration deciding to convert Gandhi Centenary Eye Hospital (GCEH) located in Dalanwala into a multidisciplinary hospital with OPDs and IPDs of medicine, surgery, Gynaecology, ENT and others, the very purpose of setting up a super speciality eye hospital has been defeated. The administration in its endeavour to set up a district hospital in Dehradun- the provisional state capital is devoid of district male and female hospital from last two and years when the Doon hospital was merged with Government Doon Medical College (GDMC) to fulfil the requirement of medical council of India- has zeroed on to the Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya (Coronation) and GCEH. The plan is to merge these two hospitals located at some distance from each other and make them into district hospital of Dehradun.
It is pertinent to mention here that after wait of nine long years the dream of having a super speciality hospital was realised on October 2, 2016 when GCEH was inaugurated. The Government Order (GO) of October 2016 clearly mentions that the GCEH would be developed into superspeciality facility for treatment of eye.
It was believed that specialists for Keratoplasty, Uvea, Retina, pediatric ophthalmology and neuro ophthalmology would be appointed in the hospital. But official apathy ensured that only cataract operations are being done in the hospital at present. The apathetic attitude of the officials towards this hospital could be gauged from the fact that tender for purchase of modern machines and equipment for the hospital has been cancelled many times in last one and half years.
It is learnt that the hospital administration had first of all sent a proposal of Rs 15 Crore for the purchase of machines but it was not accepted after which scaled down proposals of Rs 10 Crore and Rs 7 Crore were sent by the hospital but they too were not accepted.
The hospital has now further watered down its demand to only Rs 2 Crores for maintaining bare minimum facilities. The doctors of the hospital admit that the earlier plans to set upultra-modern Operation Theatre (OT) with lamellar airflow facility and super speciality services in ophthalmology would not be fulfilled without proper budgetary support.
They also expressed dismay at the attempts to roll back the earlier plan of a super speciality centre for eye care and make the hospital as part of the district hospital.
When contacted, the Chief Medical Superintendent (CMS) of the hospital, Dr R C Nagpal refused to comment on the reason as to why the original plan of developing GCEH into super speciality centre is not being followed.
He merely informed that the hospital caters an OPD of 70-80 patients a day and 25-30 operations of cataract are being done in a month by the eye surgeons.