In a major initiative for recruitment of doctors from south Indian States, the Director General (DG) of health services, Dr RP Bhatt is on a three-day visit of Tamil Nadu. The DG would visit some medical colleges there and discuss the possibilities of recruitment of doctors from there. The health services of Uttarakhand are reeling under acute shortage of the doctors with more than 60 per cent of the posts vacant.
The plan to recruit doctors from the States like Tamil Nadu and Odisha was conceived by State Health Minister Surendra Singh Negi. In a recent interview with The Pioneer the health minister had said the state is expected to get about 300 medicos from these two states. He informed that the pay structure of doctors in Uttarakhand is higher than these two states. Further the state of Tamil Nadu has large number of medical colleges due to which the number of new medicos passing out from them is much higher.
The Director Medical health, Dr Kumsun Narriyal said that DG is expected to visit some medical colleges after that other officials of health department would visit these states to work on his tour. To expedite the process of selection of doctors the state government has constituted a separate ‘Medical Service Selection Board’ headed by former Director General (DG) of health services, Dr I S Pal. Earlier the recruitment of medical officers was done by the state public service commission in a long and time taking process which ended up with less number of selected doctors joining the service.
The outcome of the latest move of the state government would have a great effect on the state health services which is almost defunct in remote and mountainous areas of the state. It is worth mentioning here that the State health department had launched many schemes like guest doctor scheme, introducing Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and tying up with the private hospitals to fill gaping holes in the tottering health system of the state but all these schemes failed to have the desired the results. However the health department is of the view that young medicos would join the health services as implementation of Departmental Assured Career Progression (DACP) has made the services in the state attractive as ever.