Don’t be surprised by the spectacle of a medical officer with distinct Tamil accent manning a Government health post in Uttarakhand in the near future, as the Medical health and family welfare department of Uttarakhand has entered into a tie up with a private agency to recruit doctors from Tamil Nadu. This agency would facilitate the process of recruitment of doctors into staff crunched health services of Uttarakhand from the medical colleges of Tamil Nadu.
It is learnt that the agreement between the agency and the State health department was inked during the recent visit of Director General (DG) of health services Dr R P Bhatt to Tamil Nadu. Dr Bhatt told The Pioneer that agency is actually part of a NGO of Tamil Nadu with expertise on health related issues. He said that there are 44 medical colleges in Tamil Nadu and more than 2600 young medicos pass out from these colleges every year. “Good number of doctors could be recruited from Tamil Nadu provided we are able to attract them a lucrative offer,” Bhatt said. A team of newly constituted Medical Services Recruitment Board is expected to visit the state of Tamil Nadu. The board would be assisted in its work of recruiting doctors by the selected agency.
The plan to recruit doctors from the states like Tamil Nadu and Odisha was originally conceived by the state Health Minister Surendra Singh Negi. The state health service is expecting to recruit 300-400 medicos from these two states. The basic premise of the officials of state health department to target these states is that the pay structure of doctors in Uttarakhand is higher than Odisha and Tamil Nadu has large number of medical colleges.
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. In a latest initiative the health department has also proposed to increase the retirement age of doctors by two years.