The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : How to make the GH self-sustaining

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 01, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

How to make the GH self-sustaining

Staff Reporter

Partial privatisation, specialised services `is the way forward'

CHENNAI: On the eve of the inauguration of the new blocks at the Government General Hospital (GGH), old students of the Madras Medical College want the massive tertiary health care to concentrate more on specialised services. Pay wards using private practitioners expertise can help fund the hospital's development, they say.

Specialist doctors say the college needs more dedicated teachers. Its alumni settled abroad want to donate to the hospital but the red tape is a deterrent, they feel.

"It is one of the biggest hospitals on this side of Suez Canal," says M. Rajkumar, assistant professor of vascular surgery at the hospital and an alumnus of Madras Medical College to which the hospital is attached.

Until the 1970s, the college came under the University of Madras and was the examination centre for the students of MMC, Stanley and CMC Vellore.

Today, with one professor and six assistant professors, MMC is the only institution in the country to offer the three-year M.Ch degree in vascular surgery, says Dr. Rajkumar.

For 10 years until 1994, only one student was admitted to this super specialty course.

Says T.C. Chandran, head of the plastic surgery department at Stanley Medical College: "You can see a variety of patients [at the GH] that you will never see in the world.

For surgeons like me it is a good training ground."

"International faculty could come back and give guest lectures. In vascular surgery we are already doing it," Dr. Rajkumar says.

Ophthalmologist Mohan Rajan, who has his own clinic in the city, says the hospital was considered "lucky" even when it did not have high-tech equipment. "It is one of the major centres for trauma. Making it user-friendly could help sustain the hospital."

He suggests partial privatisation could be tried by allowing general practitioners to admit their patients to the Government general hospital. "Make it 50 per cent free.

At least 30 per cent could be given" to private practitioners, who could make use of the tertiary care facilities available at the hospital.

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