The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to launch a vaccination campaign, ‘Dastak’, from April 2 under which 33 lakh children up to the age of 15 years will be vaccinated against Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) in 38 districts.
Health Minister Sidharth Nath Singh said that for the first time, the state government had provided Rs 20 crore from the Budget and another Rs 78.25 crore under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) for prevention of vector-borne diseases.
“We have already vaccinated 93 lakh children against JE/AES in the current financial year, which is 103 per cent of its target,” the minister said in the Assembly on Monday.
Replying to a series of questions during Question Hour, the minister said that the government had appointed over 2,500 new doctors out of a total vacancy of 7,500 doctors that include 2,600 AYUSH doctors. “The government has 102 ventilators and an additional 100 ventilators have been purchased for Gorakhpur and Basti divisions that are affected by JE/AES,” Singh said, adding that the Basti district hospital would be upgraded as a medical college and another hospital would come up in the district. Medical Education Minister Ashutosh Tandon said that the new 500-bed children’s hospital in Gorakhpur would start functioning from February 2019.
Biometric attendance
In reply to another question of Aditi Singh (Congress), the minister said that biometric attendance would be made compulsory in all community and primary health centres (CHCs and PHCs) by the end of this year. “We have already made biometric attendance mandatory for doctors and other employees in CHCs of 46 districts and PHCs in 36 districts so far,” he said.
Private practice
Singh said that the government had initiated action against doctors and nursing homes who were employing government doctors.
“We raided 27 nursing homes in 2017 and 11 FIRs were registered against doctors. A law has been made under which not only the licence of a nursing home found guilty of employing government doctors will be cancelled but the case will also be handed over to Income Tax department against government doctors under Disproportionate Asset (DA) case,” he said. In reply to a question of Bahujan Samaj Party member Ritesh Pandey, the Health Minister said that there were 11,400 registered nursing homes in the state. “We have detected 1,240 unregistered nursing homes during raids in which 686 FIRs were registered and 27 nursing homes were sealed and notices were serviced on 510,” he informed the House.
Post-mortem
The minister agreed to increase the timing of post-mortems from 2 pm to 5 pm and announced that the PHCs and CHCs would be linked for tele-medicine through a toll free number so that the poor could get facilities without going to hospitals.