Telangana has highest MBBS seats per lakh population in India, says health department report

The report was released on Sunday, 29 January, after a two-year Covid-induced interval.

Rao said efforts are on to hire 12,522 permanent employees to fill up the vacancies in the health department. As many as 969 doctor posts have already been filled and the department has issued notifications to recruit 1,147 assistant professors and 5,200 staff nurses.

The state government has issued orders for establishing four super speciality hospitals (TIMS) at Gachibowli, LB Nagar, Alwal and Sanath Nagar in Hyderabad. Similarly, a Health City and super speciality hospital have been sanctioned for Warangal.

Maternal Health and Nutrition

The annual report said 13.91 lakh women benefitted from the KCR KIT Scheme since its inception. The Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) in Telangana has seen a downward trend from 92 in 2014 to 43 in 2018-20.

Institutional deliveries in public health centres have increased from 30.5 percent in 2015-16 to 61 percent in 2022.

The health minister said that 38 Special Natal Care Units were established in 2022. “Thirteen more SNCUs will be set up in 2023. Forty-six Newborn Stabilization Units (NBSUs) are functional in the state and 10 New NBSUs are approved. Infant Mortality Ratio has decreased over the years from 39 in 2014 to 21 in 2020,” Rao said.

He added that to achieve “Avoidable Blindness Free Telangana”, the government has taken up universal eye screening by covering the entire population of the state under Kanti Velugu 2023 programme.

The programme was launched on 18 January. “As many as 1,500 teams were formed for screening and the programme will run for 100 working days,” the health minister said.

He further said that Telangana was the first state to conduct a fever survey during the pandemic, which was appreciated by the government of India and was emulated by many states. Telangana has been a front-runner in Covid vaccination.

Food at nominal cost

The government is providing free food to patients in hospitals but the bystanders find it difficult to find food within hospital premises.

The government has launched a scheme to provide three meals a day to attendants of patients in 18 major government hospitals at a nominal cost of ₹5 per meal. Eight lakh meals were provided during the past six months.

An MoU for a converged scheme of “Ayushman Bharath PMJAY – Aarogyasri” was signed on 18 May 2021. The maximum coverage limit per family per annum has been increased from ₹2 lakh to ₹5 lakh.

Employees and Journalist Health Scheme has been implemented to provide cashless treatment to all state government employees, pensioners, journalists and their dependent family members. There are 344 empanelled hospitals under this scheme and 12, 04,654 people have enrolled in the scheme.

The health minister also highlighted the following:

· Sanction has been accorded for the upgradation of NIMS from 1,489 beds to 3,489 beds
· 61 new dialysis centres with 515 new dialysis machines sanctioned
· State-of-the-art diagnostic facilities set up in hospitals
· More than one crore lab tests conducted under Telangana diagnostics free of cost
· Oxygen generation capacity increased from 135 MT per day to 332 MT per day.

The oxygen generation capacity in Telangana, which was 135 metric tonne/day during the second wave of Covid-19, has been increased to 332.6 metric tonne/day as of now, it said.

Free dialysis is provided to patients in government hospitals. These centres are run in public-private partnership mode under the hub and spoke model. So far, 50 lakh dialysis sessions have been conducted, the report said.