'34% medical equipment across country dysfunctional'

NEW DELHI: A massive exercise to map the inventory of all bio-medical equipment, including their functionality status, has revealed that 13-34 per cent of equipment across the country was dysfunctional across states, an official said on Monday. The cost of the dysfunctional equipment is Rs 1,015.74 crore, the Health Ministry said. "The mapping was successfully completed in 29 States resulting in 7,56,750 number of equipment in 29,115 health facilities, costing approximately Rs 4,564 crore being identified," the Health Ministry said in a statement here. The mapping was part of a massive exercise to map the inventory of all bio-medical equipment taken following the instructions of Health Minister J.P Nadda. Nadda's order comes after recent observations made by the Prime Minister on equipment in various hospitals that are either unused or there is no maintenance resulting in wastage of resources, The Ministry has also prepared comprehensive guidelines along with Request For Proposal (RFP) on Biomedical Equipment Management and Maintenance Program (BMMP), linked with uptime of equipment. "Under BMMP, support is being provided to the state governments to outsource medical equipment maintenance comprehensively for all the equipment across all the facilities. Subsequent to inventory mapping, RFPs/tenders were rolled out to award maintenance contract for the respective states," said the Ministry. "Eleven States namely Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan, Mizoram, Chandigarh, Maharashtra, Sikkim, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Jharkhand and Puducherry have outsourced the maintenance. Three states -- Tripura, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh -- have completed the tendering process and are in the program implementation stage," said the statement. Five states -- Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Gujarat -- have released the RFP and are in the process of finalising the tenders. "Other states are yet to issue the RFP. For 12 States where work orders have been issued, the dysfunctional equipment costing Rs 378.11 crore became functional in four months of work order. There has been a reduction in dysfunctionality rate of about 25 per cent with downtime of 3-4 months to about 5 per cent with maximum downtime of seven days," said the statement. Expressing satisfaction over the exercise, Nadda said: "The implementation of BMMP has helped in improving diagnostics services in health facilities, thereby reducing cost of care and improving the quality of care in public health facilities."