The administrators of the associated hospital of Doon Medical College (DMC) finally woke up to the problems faced by the patients due to the absence of signboards mentioning the location of OPDs and the OPD days of doctors as it installed the signboards at many places of the hospital campus on Tuesday. It is pertinent to mention here that The Pioneer in its edition of February 16 had prominently highlighted the problem faced by the patients due to absence of signboards. A situation of chaos had prevailed in the biggest hospital of the state as the whereabouts of doctors, their OPD days and their sitting plan was not known even to the hospital staff.
The Principal of DMC, Dr Pradeep Bharati Gupta said that more patient friendly notices would come up in the hospital premises. He said that flexes are being installed at present which are temporary and as things would get settled in near future these flexes would be replaced by permanent boards.
As the hospital is now part of the medical college the authorities are trying to run it on the lines of an associated medical college hospital. In the new set up the hospital administration has divided the doctors at its disposal into different units. In the bigger branches like Surgery and Medicine, three units each are made. Under this system, one unit serves in OPD on fixed days of week and on other days they serve either in IPD or have operations.
In the erstwhile Doon hospital the doctors used to see the patients daily and their rooms were also fixed. One of major fallout of the new plan and the accompanying chaos it created was that the number of patients visiting the OPDs of the hospital had decreased drastically. The observers are of the view that with more doctors and specialists the DMC would be a boon for the people of the state but it can take some time to settle things for the administration.