OPDs at AIIMS Jhajjar to begin from Monday
New Delhi : The
out-patient departments at the second campus of AIIMS at Badhsa village in Jhajjar, Haryana, will be functional from
Monday Nov 26, 2012.
Inaugurating the new campus on
Saturday, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the outreach campus will also house the country’s national cancer
institute, built at a cost of Rs 2,100 crore.
Azad said the new campus was
completed four months after the foundation stone was laid in May.
“In 2011 alone, our main AIIMS
campus saw 26 lakh OPD patients. This is a huge load and the infrastructure at
AIIMS is bursting at its seams. As a result, patients have to wait for long
periods for various procedures and services. We expect to treat around 25,000
OPD patients at the Jhajjar campus every month,” he said.
AIIMS
director Dr R C Deka said the new campus initially will have OPDs in
paediatrics, gynaecology, medicine, surgery, orthopaedics and ophthalmology. “In
the long term, it will be expanded to a full-fledged super-specialty teaching
and research institute,” he said.
AIIMS will outsource the laboratory
tests at the Jhajjar campus to HLL Lifecare Limited, a public-sector unit of
the Health Ministry.
In
another first, the outreach campus pharmacy will provide free generic medicines
in 194 drug categories to all patients for a month.
The pharmacy has also been outsourced to the same company.
The 300-acre campus was donated free
of cost by the Haryana government. It will also house a proposed national
cardiac care centre. “We have asked for expression of interests (EOIs) from
international consultants to draft the master plan for the campus. The cancer
institute will have 600 beds. Once
various departments are completed, the entire hospital will have 2,000 beds,”
Azad said.
The centre will be manned by doctors
from AIIMS from 9 am to 1 pm on weekdays. “We will refer patients who need
advanced care to government hospitals in Gurgaon and Bahadurgarh. If
further specialisation is needed, we will refer them to the AIIMS main campus,”
Dr Shakti Gupta, medical superintendent of the outreach OPD, said.
Haryana government officials said
the the top priority will be to improve connectivity to the campus, which is 17
km from Gurgaon.
Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh
Hooda said, “The Gurgaon-Badli Road will be made four-lane.
The new campus will benefit patients from Haryana and states like Rajasthan and
Uttar Pradesh.”
