R Dutta Choudhury
Public healthcare services in Assam is heading towards an uncertain future as the State is facing severe shortage of doctors.

To complicate the situation, doctors are not showing keenness to join the government service, while a number of senior doctors of the medical colleges have taken voluntary retirement, resulting in shortage of faculty members. Doctors from outside are also not willing to come and serve in Assam.

Under the present circumstances, though the Government is setting up new medical colleges, there is shortage of faculty to maintain the quality of the same.Health Department sources admitted before The Assam Tribune that the doctor-patient ratio in Assam is still much higher than the national average. At present, Assam has only one doctor against more than two thousand persons, while, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation, there should be at least one doctor against a thousand persons. The situation may become worse, at least in the public sector in the days to come because the fresh graduates are also showing reluctance to join the Government services. According to an estimate, around 50 per cent of the posts in the State health services are vacant and whenever advertisements to fill up the posts of doctors are published, the number of applicants is far less than the number of posts.

Same is the situation in the medical colleges, which are also facing severe problem due to shortage of doctors and the problem is complicated with senior doctors taking VRS. A significant number of them resigned to join private sector hospitals not only in Assam but also in the hospitals elsewhere in the country. Only recently, advertisements were published to fill up 38 posts in the Anaesthesia Department of the medical colleges and only six doctors applied, which showed the sorry state of affairs.

Sources admitted that lack of a clear cut and well laid down transfer policy of the Government is one of the key reasons for the lack of willingness of the doctors to apply for posts in medical colleges and State services. “No one knows when he or she will be transferred to which place. There is a common perception that those having the right connections in the corridors of power in Dispur will be posted in Guwahati or other major towns, while, most of the doctors who do not have the right connections will be shifted whimsically. If this perception is not changed, more and more doctors will be reluctant to join the Government services as they have other avenues,” sources pointed out.

Sources said that though the Government has made it compulsory for the MBBS graduates to serve in rural areas for one year before they become eligible to apply for post graduate courses, this has not helped much as such young doctors are forced to spend most of their time and energy in preparing for the entrance examinations for post graduate courses. In this case also, persons having the right connections are posted near the towns.

Health Department sources further said that lack of proper planning by the Government also resulted in the present state of affairs. The first medical college in the State was set up in the 1940s followed by the other two in 1960 and 1968. For 40 years, no Government thought of setting up new colleges, which created a major vacuum.

Though Jorhat, Barpeta and Tezpur medical colleges started functioning with the minimum level of faculty prescribed by the Medical Council of India (MCI), health care facilities in the colleges are severely affected because of shortage of doctors. In Assam, Guwahati and Silchar medical college hospitals, the Post Graduate Students take a huge burden of treating the patients to keep the hospitals running. But it is not possible to open post graduate courses in the new colleges because of lack of adequate faculty members and other infrastructure as recommended by the MCI.

The Government has now started the process of setting up new medical colleges in Dhubri, Lakhimpur, Nagaon and Diphu but no one still knows from where adequate number of faculty members will be brought. If faculty members from the existing medical colleges are shifted, those will suffer badly. “In fact, Assam has caught itself in a vicious web. On one hand we need new medical colleges to make up for the shortage of doctors, while, on the other, there is shortage of faculty members for the new medical colleges,” sources admitted.