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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Even a CAT scan has a 4-month wait list at AIIMS by Kounteya Sinha

Even a CAT scan has a 4-month wait list at AIIMS by Kounteya Sinha

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published Published on Oct 9, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 9, 2011

It could take you as long as two years to get a date for a simple MRI scan in the country's premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) while a CAT scan has a waiting period of more than four months. Patients requiring a total hip replacement or a total knee replacement, will wait for no less than 5 months. A waiting list - ranging from 2 months to a year or more - is the case with almost every department in the institute, according to an internal analysis.

The study says 453 faculty members and 1,200 resident doctors handled 15.28 lakh outpatients, 84,000 admissions and 78,000 surgeries, teaching 1,661 students, investigating 381 projects and publishing 1,424 scholarly papers in 2009-10 alone.

"The waiting time for procedures can range from months to years right now. This is mainly because the work load is tremendous for doctors - nearly 10,000 patients a day in OPDs alone while we can handle a maximum of 6,000," says says Dr Shakti Kumar Gupta, head of the department of hospital administration that carried out the study. "Besides general patients, we are also getting a huge number of referred patients from not just across the country but neighboring countries like Nepal and Bhutan."

Those who need a surgery to remove a malignant tumour have to wait six months while those suffering a benign tumour will get a date of surgery 24 months later. A gynecological procedure for cancers will have to wait 6 months and double that time for benign conditions. A corneal transplant has a waiting period of half a year while a retinal surgery could take at least four months.

To undergo a myringoplasty (a surgery to close a hole in the eardrum) and a modified radical mastectomy (removal of the breast affected with cancer), patients might have to wait 24 months while for a cochlear implant surgery, the minimum waiting period is two months.

Young boys have to wait 2-4 months for a hypospadias repair that corrects a birth defect in which the urethra (the tube that carries urine from the bladder to outside the body) does not end at the tip of the penis. For correction of a stricture urethra - narrowing of a section of the urethra that causes blocked or reduced flow of urine - the department of urology has no date before 6-8 months.

Gupta points out that cost is a big factor behind the backlog. "Patients prefer AIIMS because it is cheaper than other hospitals. The in-patient care borne by AIIMS is around Rs 2,100 a day, while laparoscopic general surgical procedures costs it Rs 50,000, ICU care comes to Rs 6,900 per day, kidney transplant Rs 2 lakh and robotic urology surgical procedures cost Rs 1.5 lakh. However, a patient in the general ward has to pay only Rs 35 per day for the diet, medicines, other consumables and importantly surgical procedures."

The institute's Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum, however, says the problem lies in the government's abysmal spending on health. "Any tertiary referral centre will crumble if you don't create enough health infrastructure in the periphery. Community and primary health centres besides district hospitals need to be upgraded. At present, India spends around 1% of the GDP on health while developed countries which have far less disease burden and people have higher paying capacity spend 8-15% of their GDP on health. Spending on health in India has to be at least 5% of GDP," the forum's spokesperson said.

Experts say the waiting time is more acute is departments like neurosurgery. "This is because a single surgery can take six to eight hours. On the other hand, the number of OT hours is less. At any given point of time, 300 patients visit a single OPD every week. A week has four OPDs in total. So the doctor sees more than 1,000 cases. If 50% of these cases require surgery and four big surgeries are carried out in a single OT, the waiting will increase tremendously," a doctor said.

According to Dr Gupta, things will speed up once six AIIMS-like institutes come up as promised and medical colleges are upgraded. "It will take another two years for these new institutes to come up. They will have excellent infrastructure and equipment." As an afterthought, he adds, "But the fear is where will good faculty come from."

The Times of India, 9 October, 2011, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Even-a-CAT-scan-has-a-4-month-wait-list-at-AIIMS/articleshow/10283082.cms


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