Health centres in Chennai to be upgraded and patients to get quality medical care
Posted on: 19/Dec/2019 9:45:07 AM
There is a common feeling that the health centres in Chennai are not up to the mark and they do not provide quality health care when compared to other government hospitals etc.
It is now said that GCC is having plans to upgrade the health centres and deliver quality health care near homes. The superb information is there are plans to conduct some basic surgeries, deliveries and treat non-communicable diseases at PHC or primary health centres and community health centres.
Information collected in each of the 15 community health centres that are 100 bedded hospitals would have a general medical practitioner, paediatrician, gynaecologist, anaesthetist and a surgeon.
Rundown buildings are being used now for the purpose of the health care facilities in the extended areas and some of them do not have enough space for the daily patients also. To record every medical detail of a patient, the IT-enabled service system has been planned by the GCC. The database collected would be used to improve treatment. The point is this would be in sync with the directorate of public health plan for the state of TN.
For the treatment of cold, cough, fever, diabetes etc, people visit neighbourhood health centres but due to the absence of fulltime specialists the patients get referred to the government hospitals.
It is now brought out that if the last mile health centres get upgraded then crowds could be avoided at the hospitals and patents won’t have to spend huge amounts for their travel.
An official later spoke about how the health centres should have facilities similar to the government hospitals and how long-distance travel for the patients should not be there. He added that government hospitals must be kept free to concentrate on patients who need tertiary care. He hinted that core places in Chennai have many health care centres and the extended areas have very few.
For establishing a PHC, a survey of land available in each zone would be carried out and if there is no chance then the existing building would be renovated. For the sake of construction, the land reclaimed from the encroachers would be used.
The good news is in the last 1 year the number of people visiting PHCs has doubled. The risk core of every patient above the age of 18 is evaluated since November 2018. The nurses have been collecting BMI, family history of health issues and lifestyle habits etc to calculate the score. It was later revealed by Dr Pradeep Selvaraj that if the score was above 5 then the patient was taken up for master check-up to screen for issues like BP, Diabetes, heart/kidney diseases, cancer etc. More than 5 lakhs of people have been screened in the last 1 year
