The government constituted the Delhi Health Corporation (DHC) to take care of all the non-clinical works and ensure that doctors and paramedical staff are deployed purely in healthcare services related to attending patients only.
“Several doctors are working on non-clinical assignments for which the core work of the health department — attending to patients — is getting affected. Furthermore, they are not trained to deal with procurement, maintenance and distribution of consumables and medical instruments,” said Satyendar Kumar Jain, Delhi’s Health Minister. He further added that the government will hire market experts, information technology experts, managers and supply chain management experts to ensure supply of medicines, consumables, facilities and medical instruments.
“The extent of wastage of resources could be assessed with the fact that 89 specialist doctors are deployed for distribution of medicines in 36 hospitals of the Delhi government besides hundreds of paramedics like pharmacists, nurses and compounders,” added Jain. He further added that the government wants doctors to focus only on patient care. The registration of DHA has been completed and it will start working in the next two months, informed the minister, adding that all future health projects related to non-clinical part of the health department would be handled by the new body.
“After relieving these doctors and paramedical staff from these non-clinical jobs, we can deploy them to overcome shortage of doctors in our hospitals and also in upcoming polyclinics and mohalla clinics,” added Jain. The Delhi government has a target to open 1,000 mohalla clinics by December and 150 polyclinics in the current financial year by March 2017.
The proposed DHC will be completely an autonomous government-owned body headed by a Chairperson. “There will be Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) to head various departments like procurement, distribution, digitisation, maintenance of the hospitals, outsourcing, health cards etc,” said Jain.
The present Central Procurement Agency, constituted for centralised procurement of medicines will also be merged with DHC. Highlighting the importance of DHC, Jain said that the present expenditure of around Rs 600 crore on medicines will come down significantly as DHA would enter in competitive bidding in the open market through online tendering process for bulk purchase.
In the new system, the hospitals of the city government will have to place their weekly demands online to DHA and the new body will be responsible to ensure timely supply. He further informed that the Delhi government will soon purchase 100 X-Ray machines through centralised system.