Dissolve the inactive committee appointed for controlling the working of charity hospitals immediately – Arogya Sahayya Samiti

Presently, many schemes are under implementation in the charity hospitals for the benefit of poor patients; however, the poor patients are deprived of the benefit since these schemes are not being implemented in an appropriate manner. This is an injustice to the poor patients. The Government had appointed a Committee of expert doctors under the Chairmanship of Dr. Tatyarao Lahane to ensure the quality the treatment given to poor and socially weak people from society by the charity hospitals, to look into obstacles faced in giving the treatment, the charges applied for the treatment, rates of medicines and whether the rules of reservation of beds in the hospitals as per prevalent rules are followed or not, etc. This Committee of experts was bound to submit their report to the Charity Commissioner and Government every three months. In reality, this Committee has not held even a single meeting in the last 5 years, not inspected a single hospital and did not submit a single report to the Government. Therefore, the inactive Committee, which could not hold a single meeting in the last 5 years, should be immediately dissolved and appropriate action should be taken in the matter, demanded Dr. Uday Dhuri on behalf of Arogya Sahayya Samiti. H.H. Shivaji Vatkar of Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and Mr. Arvind Pansare, spokesperson, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti were also present on this occasion.

From April 2017 to December 2017, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti took a lead and visited many charity hospitals that are enjoying various facilities from the Government and studied whether the Government schemes are being advertised and action is being taken as per the rules in the schemes. During these visits, it was found that Government schemes are not publicised adequately in many of the hospitals. In fact, it is binding on these hospitals to do so. In this background, it is more serious for the Committee of expert doctors to remain inactive and keep the poor people in society are deprived of the benefits of the Government schemes. In this regard, we have submitted a memorandum to the Chief Minister and Health Minister. Through this memorandum, Arogya Sahayya Samiti has put forth demands to dissolve the present Committee and establish a new Committee of competent experts, take a periodical review of the working of this Committee. Along with this demand, several other demands such as wide publicity should be given to the working of the new committee, inquiry report and action taken so that these become transparent. Similarly, Samiti also demanded that a system should be devised to endure that if the complaints from the common patients are not addressed appropriately by the Charity Commissioner, they should be directly received by the above expert’s Committee.