IT Chandigarh

Chandigarh:

Chandigarh administration has set up a healthcare centre at Rajpur Khurd village to provide healthcare services to the villagers at their doorsteps. The residents will be provided free primary health services which include: registration of pregnancy, prenatal and postnatal checkups along with immunisation, etc.
Immunisation facility for diseases including Tuberculosis, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Polio and Measles will also be provided. Auto disable syringes and oral rehydration solution packets will also be provided.

Chandigarh: In an effort to bring together autonomous medical specialties under a common roof, the Ivy Multi-Specialty Hospital in Mohali unveiled a unique ‘health mall’ today.

Chief Executive Officer of the Ivy Hospital and Cancer Research Institute, Gurtej Singh, said the concept will help the institute upgrade the existing hospitals into full-fledged composites where experts from across the globe can set up their individual departments.

He emphasised that the concept would lead to a reduction in the running costs, as the common infrastructure will be shared by the separate departments.

“At present, we have seven different departments in the hospital, which are owned and operated by highly rated experts and surgeons of the country and abroad. These departments include an advanced urology centre, radiation therapy centre and a nephrology centre,” said Singh.

Now, the hospital has tied up with US-based RG Stone and Urology Institute and Radiation Therapy Services Inc.
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Panchkula: Fondness for high life among the rich and influential led the ninth class passed Sandip Sharma to start a hospital in Sector 20 here. He had never anticipated that the long arms of law would finally catch up with him.

Now, incarcerated in a police station, Sharma’s amazing story of fraud could well be similar to Munnabhai of Bollywood. He worked as a doctor at Karnal and Panchkula, interviewed many postgraduate doctors for employing them in his hospitals at Panchkula and Kurukshetra, and even swindled crores of rupees from banks in the name of his hospitals.

He was so well-connected and influential that a former SP of Panchkula even provided him security even as he was an accused in the bank dacoity at Allahabad Bank in Shahpur village near Ambala cantonment in 2004. How, he managed to receive the huge grants against holding the free medical camps was yet to be investigated, said sources in the police.

Sandip was arrested by a team of Haryana Crime Bureau from Chandigarh. The sources in the police said Sandip, who is very clever, kept on changing his hideouts frequently to dodge the police in cities, including Patiala, Kurukshetra, Delhi, Jaipur, and Chandigarh since January 30 when the police raided his hospital in Sector 20 at Panchkula on the complaint of a civil surgeon.
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Chandigarh: The diagnosis of the rheumatic heart diseases among the children is set to be revolutionised. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Germany-based Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in collaboration with the PGI, is set to create infrastructure for “inexpensive” test for the diagnosis of these diseases among the children.

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“In fact, the devising of the test at the research centre is the result of 20 years research. The recent grant of euros 1.3 million by the European Commission to the centre will go a long way in the creation of the testing infrastructure in several parts of the world in collaboration with our research partners,” Dr GS Chhatwal, director of microbiology, at the centre, said here today.

Once put in place, the testing facilities would prove to be a boon for the potential heart patients among the children as over 15 million children, including 6 million in India, were suffering from the heart diseases, said Dr Chhatwal.

The PGI, Chandigarh, AIIMS, New Delhi, and CMC, Vellore, are collaborating with the Germany centre besides an institute each in Scotland and Sweden. PGI director Dr KK Talwar was principal investigator in the project.
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Chandigarh: India has a high incidence of genetic diseases with nearly 7.8 lakh new cases of congenital malformations every year, Prof I.C. Verma, a doctor from New Delhi, said here today.

Addressing an international conference on medical and community genetics being hosted by the department of haematology, PGI, he said states where the infant mortality rates had fallen were witnessing an increase in cases with genetic problems.

Prof Bittles, adjunct professor of community genetics and comparative genomics, Australia, highlighted the fact that despite accumulation of a large body of genetic information in diseases like cystic fibrosis, the treatment was still palliative.

Dr M. Kabra from AIIMS spoke on the ethical challenges associated with genetic research. She reiterated the role of labs involved in genetic testing, emphasising the need for licenses and strict adherence to national norms on ethical tests.

Dr Phadke from Lucknow said there was need for patient counsellors who realised that the people they were counseling might not be able to comprehend the nature of the disease.
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Chandigarh: In order to check the mushrooming of sub-standard hospitals and nursing homes in the country and playing with the health of the common consumer, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has now come out with standardisation guidelines for health care facilities.

The standard covers the guidelines on access, assessment and continuity of care, patient rights and education, care of patient, management of medication, hospital infection control, continuous quality improvement, responsibility of management, facility management and safety, human resource management, information management system of health care facilities.

These standards briefly emphasise that health care facilities define and prominently display the services that it can provide. It should have a well defined registration and admission process. Emergency patients should receive life-stabilising treatment, if resources are available or transferred appropriately to other health care facilities where care of such patients can be undertaken.

Patients and their families shall also have a right to get the information on the expected cost of the treatment. The safety aspects for the patients and the employees shall be as per the relevant rules and regulations.

They shall have a complete and accurate medical record for every patient and every medical record shall have a unique identifier.
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Chandigarh: The public-private partnership is the new buzzword at the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), the social security arm of the union ministry of labour covering over 1 crore employees.

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Prabhat C. Chaturvedi

In fact, taking this partnership to the new level, the ESIC has decided to throw open its 21 state-of-the-art hospitals in the country to the general public. A decision to this effect had already been taken by the ESIC board and the Central government would soon notify this decision, ESIC director-general Prabhat C Chaturvedi, told The Tribune here today.

Chaturvedi said over the years it had been observed that the facilities at several ESI hospitals, including Kanpur and Nagpur, were not being property utilised in the wake of decreased number of industrial workers following closure of the industrial units. The opening of the ESI hospitals for the general public would go a long way in providing better healthcare both to the beneficiaries and the non-beneficiaries besides upgradation of the existing facilities, he hoped.

On the ambitious project of the computerisation of the corporation, Chaturvedi informed that over 1 crore beneficiaries would get new smart cards over a period of three years. The unique card would have all information about the employee, including his health status, and this would prove to be a boon in case the employee changed the jobs.

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Chandigarh: India is in the midst of a catastrophic epidemic of smoking deaths, which are expected to cause about one million deaths a year during the 2010s, including one in five of all male deaths and one in 20 of all female deaths at ages 30-69.

On an average, male bidi smokers lose about six years of life, female bidi smokers lose about eight years and male cigarette smokers lose about 10 years.

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The findings are from the first nationally representative study of smoking in India as a whole conducted by a team from India, Canada and the UK.

Nearly 900 field workers surveyed all adult deaths during 2001-2003 in a nationally representative sample of 1.1 million homes in all parts of India.

Researchers compared smoking histories of 74,000 adults, who had died with 78,000 living controls.
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Chandigarh: After 10 years of path breaking surgery of ‘Takayasu Arthritis’ (Pulseless disease) by Fortis Hospital Cardiology Director Dr HK Bali, the doctor claims to have recreated history by performing a three-hour surgery of complete reconstruction of left carotid artery.

While addressing mediapersons here today, Dr Bali said 17-year old Anu was operated 10 days ago. She is the youngest person in the world to be treated for this disease.

Takayasu Arthritis (TA) is an obstructive arthritis disorder affecting mainly medium to large arteries. It has a relatively high incidence in the Asians. Although cases have been reported from all over the world, it affects the aorta and/or its major branches giving rise to end organ hypo perfusion.

The major complications attributed to the disease include Takayasu’s retinopathy, secondary hypertension and arterial aneurysms. It mostly affects young women. The ophthalmic complications generally manifest late in the course of the disease.

In 1997, Anu was treated by Dr Bali. But recently, she started showing its symptoms again. She underwent balloon angioplasty and then the entire diseased segment was treated.
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Panchkula: The health authorities have planned to immunise 78,193 children between the age group of 0-5 years during the three-day national polio round to commence on February 10 in the district. To achieve the target, a total of 388 booths will be set up at different places along with 28 transit teams and 10 mobile teams comprising 1,632 vaccinators, 75 supervisors and 10 nodal officers from the state health department.

A request for requisition for 60 vehicles has already been made with Panchkula sub-divisional magistrate Virender Dahiya in this regard by heath authorities. Dahiya has directed city magistrate Yogesh Kumar to arrange at least 40 vehicles from government departments while the rest will be hired from private transporters.

To create awareness among the masses about the drive rallies will be organised by school students on February 8 and 9 while NGOs have also been requested to adopt some areas to increase booth coverage.

Source: TNS