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| ESIC plans medical colleges to beat staff crisis |
| BS Reporter / Kolkata Mar 23, 2009, 00:49 IST |
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Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) is planning to set up 15 new medical colleges and a couple of post graduate institutes across the country by 2010-11 in order to overcome the manpower crunch it is facing.
West Bengal will get two more new medical colleges and two new post graduate institute by 2010-11.
The corporation at present faces a 40 percent shortage in specialist doctors and a shortage of 600,000 doctors and 10 lakh paramedical staff.
"The corporation faces an acute shortage of manpower, so we decided to start our medical colleges and post graduate training institutes to meet the shortage. In the first phase, the plan is to create 15 medical colleges across the country and then eventually have one college in each state. ESIC has received necessary government approval, financials are yet to be worked out, said a top official of ESIC.
Typically setting up a new medical college can cost ESIC anywhere close to Rs 900 crore, upgrading any of ESIC's existing hospital would cost little less than 500 crore.
The post graduate institutes can be set up within ESIC's existing network of hospitals.
In West Bengal ESIC plans to offer PG courses from Joka and Manicktala ESI hospital and the medical colleges will come up at Joka and Baltikuri in Howrah
“We hope to start academic session at all the new medical colleges and PG institute from 2010-11,” said P C Chatturvedi, director general, ESIC, government of India on the sidelines of a seminar organised by Indian Chamber of Commerce.
The ESIC has 14 hospitals in the state at present, two in the city of Kolkata itself, another two are in the pipeline.
It has more than 30 lakh beneficiaries in the state.
The students passing out from the ESIC's medical colleges will have to sign a bond to serve the ESIC for a term period of five years.
The fee structure will be at par or less from government medical colleges.
The capacity of the new ESIC medical colleges will be 100 seats and those of PG institutes 500 seats.
In the new ESIC medical colleges 20 percent of the seats will be reserved for ESIC stakeholders, and the rest divided between the state and centre equally.
In the PG institutes 40 per cent of the seats will be reserved for students from the state, 40 per cent for students outside state and the remaining 20 per cent will be broken into 3 categories – 10 per cent for children of insured persons, 5 per cent for children of the staff implementing the ESIC scheme and the rest 5 per cent for children of employees, said Chatturvedi.
The corporation also hopes to completes its IT roll out plan covering all its offices, dispensaries and hospitals within this fiscal.
The global tenders have been floated and Cisco, Wipro and other big IT companies have responded, he said.
ESIC was looking at opening another dispensary in Haldia.
Haldia Development Authority was in the process of identifying land, claimed Trilochan Singh, principal Secretary, state Labour and Employment department
This apart there are also plans to tie-up with private nursing homes in smaller towns like Kharagpur, Durgapur and Siliguri to provide the same quality of treatment to the locals in that area.
A R Bardhan, Director (MB) Sceme, ESIC, Bengal said "We are looking around for land and talking to the Haldia Development Authority about it. We are trying to reach out to more people by setting up dispensaries in places like Bankura and Farrakka through the PPP mode”.
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