Nadda inaugurates state-of-the-art cancer care centre
National president of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rajya Sabha MP Jagat Prakash Nadda, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar and health minister Anil Vij inaugurated the Atal Care Cancer Centre in Ambala Cantonment on Monday. The tertiary cancer care centre is named after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and has been established at a cost of ₹ 72 crore on the premises of the sub-divisional civil hospital on NH-444A.
This is the first state-run cancer care centre in Haryana and is equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment and facilities to treat cancer patients through medicine, surgery and radiation.
A medical linear accelerator for radiation worth ₹18 crore, brachytherapy for internal radiation imported at a cost of ₹4 crore and CT simulator for radiotherapy costing around ₹4 crore are part of the newlyopened hospital, officials said.
In his welcome address, Vij mentioned how Nadda, during his tenure as Union health minister, sanctioned the project for Ambala. The minister also detailed how his department fought through the pandemic and every district in Haryana has now a Covid test laboratory of its own. “To improve medical services, we will soon start mapping the state and provide medical equipment and facilities wherever needed,” Vij said in his address. The chief minister said that the centre will help provide accessible, affordable and comprehensive treatment to cancer patients not only from Haryana, but also from neighbouring states like Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Khattar declared the setting up of a 100-bed hostel to provide accommodation to attendants of patients getting treated at the centre and adding of a positron emission tomography (PET) scan and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scan machines.
Without naming Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, Khattar took a dig at him and said, “We are working on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘stand-up policy’ by providing welfare opportunities to residents to raise their income and make them self-reliant, while another leader believes in ‘sit-down policy’ by giving freebies. This ‘infection’ is already active in Delhi and Punjab, and is now spreading in the region, so we have to be cautious.”
While appreciating CM Khattar, Nadda said, “Unlike previous governments that focused on caste-based politics, the state government has presented a report card on the works done so far in their tenure.”
₹2,500 monthly pension announced for stage 3, 4 cancer patients
The CM announced ₹2,500 as a monthly pension to patients with stage 3 and 4 cancer and financially-challenged patients suffering from thalassaemia and haemophilia.