Hospital’s annual budget for medicines: ₹152.62 per bed
Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College, which tackles encephalitis and meningitis cases every year, has a budget of just ₹5.32 crore for medicines, according to the state budget figures.
This medical college, which four lakh patients visit every year, has 955 beds out of which 150 have ventilators for emergency care.
The experts at the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS) say that the budget per bed at the Gorakhpur medical college comes to just ₹152.62 per bed per year.
Professor Devendra Gupta of the SGPGIMS ventilator unit says, “Expenditure of around ₹5,000 to ₹8,000 per day is incurred on a patient on ventilator support and around ₹1,000 on an average bed. So, the government must think about increasing the medicine budget.”
Dr Harsh Vardhan of SGPGIMS says, “There is little wonder that patients have to bring many medicines and surgical items from outside as hospitals don’t have the budget for them.”
The situation at some other state-run medical colleges is similar.
“Can you believe that the Kanpur GSVM medical college has a budget of just ₹5.28 crore for medicine? This is a pathetic distribution of funds in a state with a population of 22 crore,” said Dr PK Gupta, president of Indian Medical Association (Lucknow).
Most of the time, experts say, the plea to increase the budgetary allocation for medicines falls on deaf ears. But it is incidents like the Gorakhpur tragedy that bring the attention back to the state’s crumbling health infrastructure, the experts add.