Ranchi: In Jharkhand, the health department has played with the lives of the people as expired Hepatitis B vaccines was administered to 410 children at Ramgarh District Hospital from November 2018 to January 2019.
This disclosure has been made by the CAG in its report. The CAG said that the injection given to the children had expired in October 2018. On the other hand, between July 2018 and March 2019, 4185 patients were given fake injection of Dexona in Deoghar District Hospital. Between 25 July 2018 and 23 January 2019, 17500 vials of Dexona 2 ML Injection were issued to the Deoghar District Hospital.
The drug inspector sent the injection sample of that batch to the Regional Drug Testing Laboratory, Guwahati, for testing on 30 July 2018. Where the injection was declared fake. After this again the sample was tested again at CDL Kolkata on the orders of Deoghar Civil Court.
This time again the quality of the injection was not found as per the standard. Meanwhile, 4185 injection vials out of 17,500 were issued from the Deoghar store, which were given to the patients till March 2019. Not only this, 309 patients were given injections between March 12 and March 31, 2019, even after receiving information that the injection was found to be sub-standard.
On the report, Principal Auditor Indu Aggarwal said that the CAG assessed various aspects of six district hospitals of Jharkhand from 2014 to 2019. These 6 district hospitals were Ranchi, Ramgarh, Hazaribagh, Palamu, Deoghar and East Singhbhum. It was found that there has been a 57 percent increase in the patient load in the OPDs of these hospitals in 2018-19 as compared to 2014-15. In 14- 15, where 7.5 lakh patients used to reach OPD, in 2019 the patient load reached 12 lakh but the number of doctors did not increase. The same doctor was looking after the patients in the OPD.
Earlier, when doctors were given 5 minutes to a patient they are now getting 1 minute now. There was no proper arrangement for registration, drinking water and even sitting in the OPD the report pointed. There was also a severe shortage of testing equipment in six district hospitals. A dental x-ray machine was bought in 2017 in Ranchi but it could not be installed till 2017 because the installer was not a technician.
There are 70 types of tests in hospitals, 60 types of equipment should be there, whereas in district hospitals only 12 to 18 equipments were available and most of these were also bad. At the same time, there was a shortage of about 77 percent of lab technicians. No hospital had even taken NABL accreditation for cross verification of samples. The samples of Medal and SRL also did not have NABL accreditation.
The Auditor said that there is a shortage of doctors from 19 to 56 percent in district hospitals. At the same time, there is a shortage of 34 to 77 percent paramedical staff and 11 to 87 percent of staff nurses. In OT where 23 tools are very important. There only 12 types of equipment were found. There was also a shortage of essential drugs in the OT.
Indu Aggarwal said that approval was given in August 2007 for the construction of a 500-bed building in Ranchi Sadar Hospital. Rs 131.14 crore were approved for this. The construction was to be completed in three years.
For this MoU was signed with National Building Construction Corporation Limited. It was later extended till 2012. During this, the government decided to run the district hospital on PPP mode. In July 2012, the International Finance Corporation was designated as the Transaction Advisor and Rs 137.38 crore was paid to NBCC for its work after this the tender was floated in January 2014. In which only two claims came.
After this, the tender came out for the second time, in which not a single tender came. After that, the government decided to operate it by the department itself instead of PPP mode and Jharkhand State Building Construction Corporation Limited was given administrative approval of 307.97 crores. In this way, it took more than 12 years to build a 500- bed hospital due to different decisions taken.