Express News Service
DEHRADUN: There are at least 56 state government hospitals in six districts of Uttarakhand that have no power backup, a critical requirement the absence of which can imperil the lives of patients in the event of an outage.
State health department data reveals that 45 such health establishments are in Pauri district alone and six in Bageshwar.
When asked, a state health department official said, “The government is working towards fixing this soon. Things got delayed because of the assembly elections.”
Apart from Pauri and Bageshwar, government health facilities in four other districts — Champawat, Pithoragarh, Chamoli and Dehradun — are facing problems due to power cuts, occasionally or frequently. Nainital, Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarkashi, Almora, Haridwar, Tehri and Rudraprayag districts are facing so such issues, however.
Health infrastructure in Uttarakhand is in dire straits. Last year, an RTI reply had revealed that the state had only one forensic expert against 25 sanctioned posts.
Out of 1,147 posts for specialist doctors, only 493 were available.
Similarly, the state had around 60% shortfall pertaining to child specialists, revealed another RTI reply last year.
The data accessed through RTI queries filed by Social Development for Communities Foundation also revealed that 9 out of 13 districts have less than 50% availability of specialist doctors.
A great imbalance in the distribution of specialist doctors among the districts also came to the fore.
There are no eye surgeons in the hill district of Champawat as against three approved positions whereas 11 eye surgeons are working in Dehradun as against the six approved positions.
Similarly, only one gynaecologist is available in Bageshwar out of five sanctioned posts, four in Pauri against 22 vacancies, two out of 15 in Tehri and one out of nine in Chamoli.
Chamoli and Champawat have no public health experts.
