New Delhi: With the aim of strengthening quality healthcare in the national capital, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena chaired a meeting with various stakeholders on Friday to evolve a formal system for the referral of patients between the premiere All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and other government hospitals in the city.
According to the LG office, the objective behind the move is to optimally utilize the vacant beds in government hospitals where critical but stable patients from AIIMS, which is reeling under an acute shortage of beds, could be referred for treatment. The path-breaking initiative would go a long way in managing the burgeoning patient load at the AIIMS, while also significantly enhancing the healthcare system and medical expertise at other government hospitals.
The new system will also ensure that patients who require primary and secondary healthcare services go to the other hospitals, leaving ample room for chronic and critically ill patients to get specialized treatment at the AIIMS. Also, this will prevent inconvenience to the patients who have to shuttle between different hospitals looking for beds which often results in fatalities during transit.
As a pilot project, the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Dwarka and Charak Palika Hospital will be taken on board and paired with AIIMS starting next month. AIIMS would hand these hospitals in terms of expertise and critical infrastructure and patients from AIIMS could be referred to these hospitals in case of unavailability of beds or after triaging has been completed as per patient needs.
Gradually, other government hospitals and healthcare centres will be roped in and developed as "Partner Institutions" of AIIMS, to cater to the local population in different localities of Delhi. The aim is to develop super-specialty hospitals in different localities of the national capital so that the burden on AIIMS could reduce and simultaneously people across the city could access healthcare near their homes at par with what they would have got at AIIMS.
During the meeting, the LG was informed that the emergency department of AIIMS receives an average of 866 patients daily apart from the unmanageable critical patients coming from other government hospitals due to the lack of super-specialty facilities therein. But out of these 866 emergency patients, only 50 (5.7 per cent) are admitted to AIIMS per day. However, it was observed that several beds in other government hospitals remain vacant and hence, many such patients from AIIMS can be admitted to these hospitals.
As a first step, the LG has directed the Health Department to carry out a gap analysis of available beds in all its major hospitals, within a week. At the same time, the Health Department will develop a centralized dashboard where the availability of beds in all government hospitals in Delhi is available on a real-time basis. It is because of the absence of a formal referral system that the stable patients referred out of the AIIMS face inconvenience, as often they are unable to find vacant beds and are forced to move from one hospital to another.
The meeting was attended by AIIMS Director Dr M Srinivas, Chief Secretary, Delhi Government. Chairman (NDMC), Principal Secretary (Health), Delhi government, Director (DGHS) and Medical Directors of major Delhi government hospitals.
