Rane suspends 3 staff at North Goa district hosp during surprise check

Panaji: After several complaints from patients regarding the North Goa District Hospital, health minister Vishwajit Rane on Monday issued orders to suspend two drivers and a lower divisional clerk of the hospital for dereliction of duties. He also reprimanded other staff at the hospital for being negligent during a surprise check.
He said one of the ambulance drivers deliberately made the ambulance non-functional and avoided attending to a call from a patient who suffered a cardiac arrest. The two drivers, Gurudas Pednekar and Subodh Naik, and LDC Yeshwant Gauthankar, are being suspended.
During his inspection at the hospital, Rane reprimanded doctors for not wearing their coats with their names, for keeping patients waiting, for allowing mothers with infants to sit on the floor, and for their lax attitude towards patients and their duty. “I will suspend you from duty if you don’t wear your coat with your name on it. I will consider it a violation of govt directions. Please wear it and come down,” he told one doctor at the hospital who was seen sitting in plain clothes attending to patients.
Addressing a press conference after the inspection, Rane said govt will start bearing the costs of Foundation 1 tests for cancer patients. Govt, with the help of corporate social responsibility, will engage a company to send the samples to the USA and send the results back to the health department in Goa. The tests otherwise cost around Rs 2 lakh, he said.
“Treatment protocol for cancer has changed. The test will indicate the best treatment protocol that your body will respond to,” he said, adding that Goa will be the first state to introduce this. Cancer mapping will also be done to better understand the population with cancer, he said.
In addition to this, proton therapy will be started at the new cancer centre. This treatment with the latest equipment will be the first of its kind in the entire Konkan belt, he said.