Stone laid for cancer hub

Patna: Chief minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday laid the foundation stone for State Cancer Institute, inaugurated the new administrative building at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) and asserted that the state government wished to make all medical college and hospitals autonomous in due course.

“We have improved primary, sub-divisional and district level hospitals. We will now improve medical colleges. Slowly, we want to make the autonomous,” Nitish said.

The chief minister was to also lay the foundation stone for a 500-bed facility at IGIMS, but the programme was deferred to May 28 as health minister Mangal Pandey cited “technical reasons” behind the post-ponement.

Speaking on the occasion, Nitish said apart from the 500-bed facility, another one with a capacity of 1,200 beds will also be constructed and a preliminary project report has been prepared for this.

“With all these, IGIMS will have a capacity of 2,500 beds. We have been making immense efforts for its development for the past few years. It was about to shut down in November 2005 (when Nitish came to power). There was no enthusiasm here. But today, we feel happy at the way it has progressed,” he said.

IGIMS, which has a 130-acre campus faces a severe space and bed crunch as it the only multi-discipline super-specialty government hospital in Bihar and has to bear the burden of around 12 crore population of the state.

Pointing out that there was only one cancer hospital that too in the private sector in Bihar, forcing people to go to Mumbai and other places in the country for treatment, Nitish said: “We want that nobody should go outside Bihar for treatment out of compulsion. We are also going to develop Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH).”

The chief minister said once Bihar becomes “open defecation-free” (ODF) and clean drinking water is available to everybody, 90 per cent diseases will not occur.

Nitish also announced that the health department will examine all old structures of hospitals across the state and those that won’t survive for long will be demolished. New buildings will come up in their place.

Speaking on the occasion, Mangal Pandey said a multi-level parking will be built at IGIMS and the government trauma centre at Bikram in Patna district will be taken over by IGIMS in future so that organs from there could be used for “live transplant”.

Mangal added that foundation stone for another cancer hospital will be laid by the chief minister within three months at Shri Krishna Medical College and Hospital in Muzaffarpur. It will come up with the help of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) and Tata Memorial Hospital.

The State Cancer Institute at IGIMS will have a 300KW solar rooftop plant that will be installed at a cost of Rs 1.56 crore. Principal energy secretary Pratyaya Amrit and principal health secretary Sanjay Kumar and IGIMS director N.R. Biswas were also present on the occasion.

Courtesy: The Telegraph