Appointment process starts to fill Trauma Centre, SSH vacancies

Nagpur: The directorate of medical education and research (DMER) may have set the ball rolling for effective functioning of ‘Trauma Centre’ (TC) and the Super Specialty Hospital (SSH) in the Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) by starting the recruitment process of doctors in the two hospitals barely six days after the cabinet nod for 147 posts for TC and 100 posts for SSH on Monday by holding walk-in-interviews.Yet there are a number of shortcomings that will prevent the TC and SSH from providing the necessary patient care in the two units of GMCH. Actually GMCH had been proposing much more than sanctioned posts but the state government didn’t bother on the issue until the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court (PIL 3427 of 2000) issued stringent directives to create posts for the two hospitals and submit the action report in the court on June 9.
However unfortunately the basic purpose of TC and SSH which aims at providing dedicated care in certain medical specialities may not be met as the GMCH is neither creating a pool of dedicated staff for the two hospitals nor appointing the desired number of senior doctors in certain essential specialities like orthopaedics and forensic medicine which are otherwise an essential requirement. But ironically there are no posts of professor or associate professor in forensic medicine. Ideally since majority trauma cases are medico-legal cases there should be at least one professor in the subject
Sources in the GMCH told TOI that the initial proposal (available with TOI) had a professor’s post in orthopaedics but the revised proposal by the present dean Dr A Niswade replaced the orthopaedic professor’s post by general surgery post. A post of an associate professor (AP) of maxillofacial surgeon, an important component of any TC, was also replaced by an AP in surgery.
“Ideally a TC should have two orthopaedics professors. The TC at AIIMS has two professors. GMCH thus should at least have one professor for desired handling of poly trauma patients. But TC necessarily may not be headed by an orthopaedician. A general surgeon could head it but ideally there should be separate head,” said former professor and head of orthopaedics at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and senior orthopaedic surgeon.
The DMER director Dr Pravin Shingare however told TOI that this was just a beginning of the TC centre and more posts may be created later depending on the need.
Also the DMER and GMCH may satisfy the court by showing the launch of recruitment process but truth remains that very few specialists turned up for the interviews especially for SSH.
Information-
· No candidates selected for cardiology, cardiovascular thoracic surgery, radiology in SSH.
· Appointments made include 1 associate professor each in neurology and endocrinology, 1 lecturer each in gastroenterology, neurosurgery, forensic medicine and pathology. Only anaesthesia got 3 lecturers.
· One senior resident (SR) was appointed each in neurosurgery, nephrology and urology for SSH.
· TC got 4 lecturers in orthopaedics, 5 in anaesthesia and just 1 each in neurosurgery and radiology.
· TC got 3 SRs each in orthopaedics and one each in neurosurgery and radiology.