CENTRAL PLAN
New Delhi, May 20: As part of an effort to improve manpower in the medical sector, the Union Government has come up with a scheme to upgrade district hospitals into medical colleges. In the first phase, 58 district hospitals across the country would be upgraded into medical colleges. Each of them will have at least 100 MBBS seats.
The cost ceiling for each medical college is Rs 190crore, of which 75 per cent will come from the Centre and the rest will have to be met by the respective state government. In north-east and hilly areas, the Centre will bear 85 per cent of the upgradation cost, a senior health ninistry official said. “At present, only 58 out of the 400 odd districts in the country which do not have medical colleges are proposed to be covered. We should be looking to cover at least 150 districts over the next four years.”
“If resources become a constraint, the scheme could be expanded to public private (PPP) mode where the investments on the medical college and upgradation of the district hospitals will
be done by private players. The state governments may, in
return, seek 50 per cent reservation of the seats in the medical colleges and 60-70 per cent of the beds in the hospitals as a sState quota,” said the official.
“At present, 65 per cent of the total 404 medical colleges are located either in South or Western part of the country. Obviously, a large part of the country is underrepresented and likely to face shortage of doctors. The government has already approved upgradation of 22 district hospitals and has released Rs 140crore as first installment to 19 such hospitals. The aim is to increase the availability of doctors, nurses and paramedics and also provide quality level secondary and tertiary care.
“With 9.2lakh doctors on the MCI register and an assumption that 80 per cent of them being available for active duty, the doctor population ratio works out to 0.7 per 1000 as against the WHO norm of 1 per 1000,” the official added. PTI