lives on the line: Queuing up at OPDs can be a pain despite online pre-registration
The Delhi Government’s ambitious plan to do away with long queues at Out Patient Departments (OPD) across Government run hospitals with the introduction of online registration hasn’t proved to be fruitful. Even after a month-and-a-half of its implementation, patients have just been running in circles after getting an appointment online with no one at hospitals to entertain them. With the Government’s processes in place, hospitals are the ones who have been cutting corners in fully embracing the plan.
In May, the Government had asked 24 Government run hospitals to cater to 100 patients per service per day on the basis on online registration. However, the hospitals are yet not equipped with the necessities to enrol this scheme.
Most hospitals reflect the oblivion that surrounds the scheme. The help desk assistants, clerks at counters and a few doctors at the lok Nayak Hospital are surprisingly not even aware of the online OPD registration scheme. “We have not been told about the scheme. As far as we know, there is no online registration system here,” said an assistant at the helpdesk outside the new OPD block.
The same issue was seen at a few other hospitals where the doctors knew about the scheme but pinned the blame on the hospital authorities for not entertaining those patients. “We have not got any specific instruction from the administration. It is not even in our hands whether to entertain someone or not because if the patient is sent to us by the clerks and nurses, we treat them,” said a doctor from lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital on condition of anonymity.
However, hospital administration said that they are trying their best to run this system. Officials from the medical superintendent’s office of lN Hospital said, “It will take a little time for the process to kick in properly but as of now the medical superintendent has sent across two circulars asking doctors to entertain the patients.” Most hospitals citing technicalities said it is a big problem to shift from the manual registration system to online. Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) feel that this system interrupts the existing one adding chaos. “Hospitals already get over 4,000 patients in OPDs per day. Instead of reducing this crowd, the online system has increased footfalls. This has added to the trouble of the staff which manages the patients because the systems are different. However, in time, this issue should be resolved,” said Rajeev Maikhuri, media coordinator at AIIMS.