Healthcare policy of BMC in City

The city can soon expect better-equipped primary healthcare facilities. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning to strengthen the primary health care services of the city and is in the process of creating a vision document to narrow down on specific health care needs, before the
city budget allocation next year.
“The outbreak of malaria in the city made us introspect and we realised the need to strengthen our primary health care system, So far, our approach was focused on tertiary health care,” said Manisha Mhaiskar, additional municipal commissioner who was addressing the workshop on the vision for the city’s health care needs on Saturday, organised by the civic department of health in association with the Observer Research Foundation. The first phase of this plan will include grading and make over of 163 civic-run dispensaries. In the next stage, 23 post partum centres and 182 health posts will be strengthen in the similar manner.
Dispensaries will be graded on the basis of their performance and physical infrastructure. The infrastructure of dispensaries will be graded under four categories - A- minimal work required, B –minor repairs, C- major repairs, D- demolish.

“Areas where these dispensaries are actually needed and where they are unnecessary will be traced,” Mhaiskar said.

The civic body will simultaneously work on linking the peripheral hospitals with its three super specialty hospitals – KEM, LTMG and Nair. “The BMC’s 16 peripheral hospitals don’t attract rich clinical talent. They are facing crunch of surgeons and we intend to take up a pilot project in which surgeons would go to these hospitals to handle critical cases,” said Mhaiskar.

November 4 onwards, BMC will start the pilot project of linking three of its main hospitals (i.e KEM, LTMG and Nair) with three peripheral hospitals (i.e Shatabdi hospital in Gowandi, Veer Savarkar hospital and Kasturba hospital respectively). The civic body is also looking at strengthening the specific specialty healthcare needs of dialysis centres and cancer-care facilities.
“There is a huge gap in the city when it comes to facilities which cater to dialysis and cancer patients. We had floated a tender on a charitable model for dialysis centres. Now we are in the process of floating a tender for a business model for these centres,” said Mhaiskar.

“Corporate involvement in terms of corporate-social responsibility is also on the cards for facelift programme of the dispensaries,” said Mhaiskar.
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