A seven-member team of experts sent by the Centre on Thursday reviewed the infrastructure at the Ispat General Hospital (IGH) at Rourkela to consider local BJP legislator Dilip Ray’s demand to accord it medical college status.
Sources said that after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention, the Central team has been dispatched to take stock of infrastructure for upgrading the IGH to a medical college and a super-specialty hospital.
Notably, Ray had met Modi in March and apprised him about the inordinate delay in upgrading the IGH to a medical college and a super-specialty hospital despite the PM’s announcement about the project as far back as in April 2015.
“The PM asked Union labour and Employment Minister Bandaru Dattatreya to expedite upgradation of the Rourkela Steel Plant-run IGH into a super-specialty hospital and medical college,” Ray had said after meeting Modi.
Besides, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had also written a letter to the Prime Minister urging him to speed up upgradation of the IGH.
Services at the IGH are dwindling day by day as vacancies of posts are galore and not filled up by the authorities. Sources said that though 107 posts of doctor were approved for the IGH, several positions are still lying vacant.
While a full-fledged medical college and hospital is underway, a super-specialty clinic was already inaugurated on April 9 at the IGH for which an MoU had been signed with the Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad.
As per the MOU, the Apollo Hospitals would depute super-specialists in nephrology and oncology every second Saturday of the month and specialists in cardiology and neurology every fourth Saturday of the month.