MARGAO: Labour Minister Rohan Khaunte on Sunday inspected the ESI hospital at Margao and expressed satisfaction with the completion of work and disclosed that the handing over of the hospital would be officially done by mid May, but said “let us wait for the chief minister to return to inaugurate it.”
Disclosing that the land for a similar hospital in Panjim will be finalised within the next three months, he said ESI dispensaries will be set up at every industrial estate in the State so that heath care is taken to the people at their door step.
The state-of-art hospital building has been constructed at a cost of around Rs 80 crore and is fitted with equipment worth another Rs 10 crore all of which has been funded by ESI at the Centre. The hospital will now be officially handed over to the ESI managed State Insurance Corporation.
The 100-bedded hospital has three operation theatres and an intensive care unit with six beds of which one is the isolation bed. Besides, it has rest rooms for the relatives of the patients. Each floor has a nurses’ lounge and doctors’ room.
Rohan Khaunte was heard telling the ESI staff to change the beds in the nurses’ lounge who had been provided with the same beds given to patients. “Unless you treat the nurses properly they will not work properly,” he said asking the beds to be changed.
“The hospital has started functioning as OPD and OTs were operating even when the building was being constructed,” said Rohan Khaunte that even locals were attended to at the OPD and casualty.
The five floor hospital is backed with central pharmacy that provides free medicines besides a pathological laboratory and various specialties like medicine, orthopaedics, surgery, gynaecology along with ayurveda and homeopathic doctors.
“We are thinking of what to do with the two top floors where maybe a dialysis unit or a day care centre can be set up,” he said adding that the aim is to have state of art medical care provided to the working class.
He said the ESI has in principle agreed to finance a similar hospital in Panjim and added that ESI dispensaries will be set up at Industrial Estates. “While we have already inaugurated the one at Tuem others are planned at Pilerne, Kundaim, Verna and Cuncolim,” he said.
Announcing that a 6 bedded dispensary will be inaugurated shortly at Mapusa, he said around 13 dispensaries will be set up in South Goa itself.
He urged people to bring to their notice any left out area and said they will take care of them when asked what plans the department had for people working along the coastal belt in the tourism sector.
