Severe bed crunch ails AYUSH hospitals

Hyderabad: Lack of initiative by successive governments to increase bed strength is making the State-run AYUSH hospitalsdifficult to compete with their counterparts in the private sector when it comes to insurance supported in-patient treatment.

According to sources in the State AYUSH Directorate, the Union AYUSH Ministry had issued specific guidelines recommending the benchmarks of treatment for various ailments and the duration of treatment and the charges for the same.

Speaking to The Hans India, a senior AYUSH official said that it was based on those guidelines the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India

(IRDAI) had notified a list of 15 General Insurance Companies (GIC) and Standalone Health Insurance Companies (SHICs). These companies have been offering various products covering one or more system of AYUSH treatment.

The benchmark guidelines of the Union Ayush Ministry says that medical services rendered at four kinds of hospitals are eligibility for AYUSH medical claims.

That apart, the hospitals should have a minimum of fifteen beds, minimum of five qualified and registered doctors, an adequate number of qualified paramedical staff, dedicated therapy sections and daily maintenance of medical records.

It was against this backdrop, the officials said that the 11 AYUSH hospitals in Telangana have maximum bed strength of around 800. However,the number of hospitals where the patients could get medical claims reimbursements by joining as inpatients are only a few, he added.

For example, in the case of Ayurveda, Hyderabad has two hospitals with the bed strength of 200 and one hospital in Warangal has the bed strength of 100.

That apart, the Medak hospital has only a bed strength of 9. The Unani hospital located in Hyderabad has the bed strength of 180. The remaining two, one located in Nizamabad and another in Warangal has bed strength of five each.

Similarly, in the case of homeopathy, the two hospitals located in the State capital have the bed strength of 100. The one at Nalgonda has the bed strength of 10 only. Likewise, the State has only one Naturopathy hospital located in Hyderabad with the bed strength of 184.

This makes only three Ayurveda, one Unani, one Homeopathy and one Naturopathy hospitals where inpatients can join and get medical claims from the insurance companies.

Giving details of how the AYUSH medical claims are important for people to avail the inpatient medical services a faculty member from the Gandhi Naturopathic Medical College in the city said, "patients facing from general to serious conditions like asthma, chronic respiratory disorder, cancerrehabilitation, amenorrhoea and several others are covered under the AYUSH benchmark guidelines for taking inpatient treatments under all AYUSH systems," he said.

The State has a large network of 440 State government-run dispensaries and 394 more dispensaries functioning under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) extending outpatient services in Telangana.

But, unless the bed strength at different hospitals is not increased at all the 11 AYUSH hospitals it is the private hospitals which will have an edge over the government-run hospitals, the sources said.