Ruia’s laxity hits patient care hard

Tirupati: Laxity in patient care seems to have cast a shadow on medical services offered at Sri Venkateswara Ramnarain Ruia Government General Hospital popularly known as Ruia Hospital in Tirupati. For the last four months or so several essential medicines have run out of stock with the hospital medical inventory urging the patients’ attendants to procure them from outside.

For instance, the hospital witnesses several cases of poisoning daily and they are required to be administered Atropin within a few minutes after admittance. Even this life saving drug is not available in the hospital. Duty doctors give the prescription to patients’ attendants asking them to bring it within 10 minutes to save the life.

Adding to the woes, the medical shop in Ruia hospital premises was also shut down since December and no steps have been initiated to issue fresh tenders so far. This leaves the attendants to run in search of medical shops which they can find only about half a kilometre away. Dopamine, Noradrenaline, Adrenaline, Dobutamine are all life-saving drugs which are to be given intravenously but drips are out of stock and not available both at casualty or inpatients wards.

Similarly, anti-malarial drug Artesunate and others like Aspirin, Clopidogrel, Pantop, Paracetamol injections and others are not available. Not only medicines, Foley’s catheter, Glucometer random blood sugar strips, McIntosh rubber sheets for surgical patients could not be found in the hospital and this list goes on. ECG machine at casualty is not working and of course, they don’t have ECG rolls also. Even nylon suture material was not available and there are many more. Out of 564 listed drugs around 200 only are available now.

AP Medical Services Infrastructure Development Corporation(APMSIDC) has to supply medicines as per the indent of the hospital. In case of non-availability of any drug with them, they issue ‘non-availability certificate’ which the hospital authorities have to buy from outside contractor selected on the basis of tenders. To buy such medicines, the Hospital Superintendent will be empowered with 20 per cent of the total budget.

Five months back, they called tenders and selected one contractor as L1. Later due to some reason he was removed and L2 became L1 who has to supply drugs at APMSIDC rates. As he did not agree to this, hospital authorities offered 30 per cent more on APMSIDC rates to which also the contractor did not agree. Hence, the problem persists with the authorities unable to find a solution to the problem.

"We have been facing acute shortage of even emergency medicines. Only one antibiotic is available and for each and every case we are using it,” said a duty doctor.

Further, as the hospital administration failed to make an agreement with Nephroplus which has been operating dialysis unit in the hospital to extend the services to inpatients, they have been sending to private hospitals for dialysis. Even patients in the ICU are being sent to private hospitals for dialysis. An attendant of a woman patient from Railway Koduru told that her condition was critical and yet they were forced to shift her for dialysis.

A senior doctor on condition of anonymity said that the problem was severe and need to be addressed immediately. However, the Superintendent Dr M Sidda Naik was not available for comment.