Despite offering one of the cheapest rates, private wards fail to draw patients
Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, Sept 24: Despite the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here claiming to offer private ward facilities at one of the cheapest rates, patients are showing lukewarm interest in occupying the private wards at the institute’s peripheral hospital.
While the general wards of AIIMS witness crowds of patients at most times, the private wards bear almost a lonely look. AIIMS offers private ward facilities to its patients at `1,000 per day, but due to reasons yet to be ascertained by the hospital authorities, patients seems uninterested in availing these facilities, which results in crowding in the general wards.
“Currently, we have 350 beds for patients in our wards, but we normally receive many more patients. Meanwhile, not many patients show interest in occupying the private wards. The crowding in general wards it causes ultimately leads to inconvenience for everyone,” said an administrator of AIIMS.
Banamali Sahu, a patient’s attendant, said people with major diseases may be interested in occupying the private ward services. “But the hospital here rarely provides treatment facilities for major diseases, which may be one of the reasons for the private wards remaining unoccupied,” he added.
Patient’s attendance data at AIIMS obtained by Orissa POST revealed that the institute saw around 32,229 cases in the outpatients department of its general surgery ward since February 2014. But a mere 650 surgeries were conducted during this time, out of which 200 were major and the rest minor operations.
The data further suggests that compared to the outpatients department, the institute receives very few patients in the in-patients wards. The peripheral hospital of AIIMS received about 11,351 patients in its OPD, 3,752 in its daycare unit while only 852 patients attended the IPD wards of the hospital between January and September 2015.