Chief Secretary stresses on offering online appointments in JK Hospitals

Srinagar, Jun 2: Chief Secretary, Dr. Arun Kumar Mehta Friday stressed on extending the facility of online appointments with doctors in the health institutions of J&K. He impressed on the health officers to work for making this service available to public within a month’s time.
Dr Mehta was speaking in the 12th Governing Body meeting of National Health Mission (NHM) attended by Principal Secretary, Jal Shakti; Commissioner Secretary, RDD; Commissioner Secretary, Social Welfare; Secretary, Health; MD, NHM; Principal, GMC Srinagar/Jammu; Director, MCH&I; Director Health, Kashmir/Jammu; Director, Ayush besides others.
Dr Mehta maintained that the prior online appointments to patients are given in many premier hospitals in the country and the Department needs to bring their own system in sync with that to make the process of visiting a Hospital easier. He told them to adopt the simplest and efficient system available.
Chief Secretary also enjoined upon the officers to digitize the patient history and other legacy data so that the same is accessible round the clock. He said that the convergence of data from Health Care Institutions, Anganwadi centres and Educational Institutions could make a database inclusive of all health details from birth till date for each person. He urged them to make it an objective to ensure 100% digitization of health records of all the individuals here in the UT.
On the occasion both the Secretary Health, Bhupinder Kumar and MD, NHM, Ayushi Sudan gave a detailed overview of the functioning of the Department especially the National Health Mission (NHM), J&K. It was given out that sufficient number of Critical Care Ambulances have been deployed across the health facilities of J&K and integrated with 108 call centre for providing 24×7 hassle-free services to people.
Moreover it was given out that the utilization of funds from the last 5 years from 2018-19 has seen progressive growth with each passing year. It was revealed that out of Rs 671.75 Cr amount of funds available in the year 2018-19, the percentage of utilization was 72%. The same increased to Rs 900.64 Cr in 2022-23 with percentage of utilization taking a quantum leap to reach 98.68% for the previous financial year.
The Governing Body discussed the proposals of the NHM to ratify State Programme Implementation Programme (SPIP) to the tune of Rs 1441.60 Cr for FY 2023-24, procurement of Covid essential Diagnostic & Drugs, Implementation of IT interventions like HMIS (e-SAHAJ) from District Hospitals and CHCs to Tertiary Care Hospitals. It also discussed maternity leave in favour of contractual female employees as per the existing labour laws and other HR related issues for making the functioning of the mission smooth and efficient.