Expect disaster management cell, well-mannered doctors and more beds in your city hospitals in 2011

Health goal next year: Better services

Expect disaster management cell, well-mannered doctors and more beds in your city hospitals in 2011

As the city continued to be the epicentre of swine flu, control of infectious diseases remained the focus for the most part in 2010. Last year, the country's indigenous H1N1 vaccine arrived and the debate was whether to take it or not.

City's health department on the one hand grappled with the rising and falling graphs of swine flu deaths and on the other, dealt with crook doctors who made money in times of vaccine shortage. They also had to deal with stray reports of vaccine reactions. By September-end, the pandemic had more or less stabilised and the focus shifted once more to pressing issues like providing free beds for the poor in private hospitals, providing free HIV medicine for all and solving the problem of shortage of ICU beds. In the next decade, the city will see strengthening of existing services and promising projects.

Expanding services
The first step is to expand services and add more hospital beds as there is a shortage of these. In the private sector, hospitals like Mai Mangeshkar and Sahyadri hospitals are in expansion mode. A new hospital proposed when the swine flu epidemic was at its peak might see the light of the day in 2011, while the Sassoon General Hospital which was granted at least Rs 350 crore for upgrading services, is likely to see a sea change in 2011.

Disaster readiness
When the German Bakery blasts shook the city, a fact that came to light was the absence of disaster management. Soon a committee was formed and a disaster management cell is likely to be established in 2011.
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Dr Arun Jamkar, former dean of the Sassoon hospital, who was also until recently the chairperson of this committee, said the city had been divided into 24 zones and a hospital had been put in charge of each to make emergency services available within 30 minutes to an accident spot. Also, the Sassoon hospital is expected to start a course in trauma medicine by the end of 2011.

Polite doctors
The Maharashtra University of Health Sciences is likely to introduce a change in MBBS syllabus that would introduce a new subject of communication skills for medical students. This course would teach doctors to be well-behaved and sensitive towards patients.

Technology
A team of doctors from the Sassoon hospital, who earlier did a study on the right dosage of drug to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, has been selected to conduct trials of the right drug combination to be administered tou00a0 pregnant HIV+ women. The study, if successful, could become a worldwide benchmark for right drug combination and dosages. District Collector Chandrakant Dalvi said the Silent Observer technology that would link all sonography clinics in the city, through an online mechanism, would be introduced in 2011. This method is being introduced to ensure that sex selective abortions do not take place and to rein in rising female foeticide.