Around 13-34 per cent medical equipment costing Rs1,015 crore have been found to be dysfunctional across States, a mapping of the inventory of all bio-medical equipment including their functionality status recently by the Centre has revealed.
The Union Health Ministry conducted the massive exercise in the wake of the observations made by Prime Minister Narender Modi on equipment in various hospitals that are either unused or there is no maintenance resulting in wastage of resources.
JP Nadda, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare had directed the officials of the Ministry to address this and devise appropriate mechanisms to ensure that medical equipment already purchased are properly maintained beyond their guarantee period.
"The mapping was successfully completed in 29 States resulting in 7,56,750 numbers of equipment in 29,115 health facilities costing approximately Rs4,564 crores being identified. It was also noted that equipment in range of 13 per cent to 34 per cent was found to be dysfunctional across States. Cost of dysfunctional equipment is Rs1,015.74 crore," said an official from the Ministry.
The Ministry has also prepared comprehensive guidelines along with request for proposal (RFP) on Biomedical Equipment Management and Maintenance Program (BMMP), linked with uptime of equipment. Under BMMP, support is being provided to the Sstate governments to outsource medical equipment maintenance comprehensively for all the equipment across all the facilities. Subsequent to inventory mapping, RFPs/tenders were rolled out to award maintenance contract for the respective States.