Hyderabad: Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan visits NIMS, interacts with private hospitals over public ire

Hyderabad: At a time when the state government is coming under sharp criticism from Opposition alleging that it had failed to check the surge of corona pandemic, Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Tuesday interacted with various hospitals in the city to convey the public grievances about non-availability of beds, billing issues and testing, etc.

The Governor told the hospitals that she being from same profession, had organised this interaction with an aim to build effective private public partnership to offer the best of medical care to the people during the pandemic. She said the ultimate aim of any medical service is to offer affordable and quality medical care to the common people and the middleclass.

The Governor emphasised on the need to maintain transparency at every level from the stage of admission to discharge. There should be transparency in billing estimates and co-morbidity conditions need to be explained to the patients and their families in advance to avoid any negative or odd situations later.

If patients are made to run from pillar to post even to get admission in hospitals they would be losing valuable time and all the good service done by the private hospitals will get undermined. She said that her prime concern as the first citizen of the State was to see that no patient in Telangana was denied cost-effective treatment. She also asked the hospitals to expedite test reports and improve testing facilities.

Similarly, she emphasised on the need for special awareness on home isolation and offer telemedicine and video counselling to patients.

The pulmonologists (chest specialists) who attended the virtual meeting highlighted the alarming situation that there is a likelihood of increase in the number of cases drastically in coming months. They said there was a need for multi-bed hospitals with thousands of beds to prevent last-minute confusion.

This exercise, however, sparked off a political controversy as the Chief Secretary and Principal Secretary (Health) did not go to meet the Governor till Tuesday evening though she had asked them to meet her on Monday afternoon.

During the brief meeting, she is learnt to have expressed her unhappiness over government's failure in taking up tests on a large scale. She wanted to know what steps the government had taken to flatten the curve.

It may be mentioned here that the Governor stated in a tweet that she has been continuously monitoring the situation for the last three months and has been interacting with the people at various levels. She said that she had given suggestions to the government and visited the Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) for an on the spot study of the situation.