Despite best efforts of the State Government, the State medical and health services are not able to attract young medicos.
The lukewarm response of the young medical undergraduates and post graduates in the State services is clearly reflected in the recent recruitment advertisement for 712 posts of medical officer by the Uttarakhand Medical Services Selection Board (UMSSB) where only less than 1100 candidates have applied till date.
The less number of applicants has forced the board to extend the last date of applications. In the reserved categories less number of candidates than total number of vacancies has applied. It is learnt that out of 200 posts reserved for the SC candidates only 140 candidates have applied. A similar situation prevails in the posts reserved for the ST candidates.
Though the UMSSB has extended the last date of application from earlier October 20 to November 10, not many candidates are expected to apply for these posts.
In such a situation the fate of this recruitment drive of doctors is also supposed to go the way of the previous such drives where the intended objective of the drive was not achieved.
The past experience also shows that less than 60 percent of the candidates called for the interview actually appear before the selection board. After selection also large numbers of selected candidates don’t bother to join the hospital allotted to them.
When contacted the Chairman of the UMSSB, Dr D S Rawat accepted that less candidates have applied in under the reserved categories. He said that the last date is being extended in view of the festival season.
In the present recruitment drive out of the total 712 posts, 200 are reserved for Schedule Caste, 33 for Schedule Tribe (ST) and 154 are reserved for the Other Backward Castes (OBC).The selected MO would be inducted in the pay scale of 56100- 177500 (level 10) of state health services.
The State Government has offered soups like implementation of Dynamic Assured Career Progression (DACP) where time bound progression in salary is assured and payment of special allowances to the doctors but all these measures have failed in attracting doctors.
It is pertinent to mention here that the state health services are virtually defunct in remote and mountainous areas of Uttarakhand due to acute shortage of doctors. The sorry State of affairs could be gauged from the fact that more than 60 percent of posts in state health services are lying vacant.
In past the department had launched many schemes like guest doctor scheme, introducing Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and tying up with the private hospitals to infuse some life into the tottering health services but all these schemes failed to have the desired the results.