Shillong, Nov 6: Chief Minister Conrad Sangma has chaired a review meeting on the shortage of specialist doctors, performance of civil hospitals and other issues under the health department.
Health Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh told reporters on Monday that the meeting was to evaluate the performance of the civil hospitals and district hospitals across the state. The government had reviewed the positions, the performance and the requirements of infrastructures.
“We are giving ourselves about 24 – 36 months and we will evaluate the performance accordingly,” she said.
“The CM was informed about the shortfall of paramedical staff, shortfall of specialists and medical doctors. This evaluation was done with the purpose to ensure that we are able to track the performances of all of our hospitals.”
The department submitted a comprehensive proposal on how to ensure specialist doctors join government services in Meghalaya.
“We must have adequate incentivisation so, it has been decided that officials will now go back and plan various proposals or packages to offer to these specialists so that we are able to fill up all vacancies in the specialist category,” she said.
According to the health minister, there is a big gap of medical officers (MOs). “We are well aware of the fact that we as a state are suffering greatly from this crunch of medical doctors. The average coverage of MOs is 60-70%. So we now are going to review all these deficiencies and we will be able to bring out more attractive packages for the doctors,” she said.
Lyngdoh said the government has decided to come up with a policy to ensure everyone in the health department should have a compulsory difficult posting.
“We have evaluated the scale of all health personnel and we have seen that there are provisions for acquiring of housing facilities for doctors and nurses”, she added.
