In an interesting trend in Andhra Pradesh, young IAS officers and their spouses are preferring the government hospitals for treatment, to send a strong message that these much-maligned institutions are on a par with the private ones.
IAS officer and Sub-Collector of Rajamahendravaram Vijaya Krishnan on Wednesday gave birth to a healthy male baby not in a corporate hospital but in the government area hospital in the tribal Agency area of Rampachodavaram in East Godavari district. Her husband, A.S. Dinesh Kumar, is working in the same area as Project Officer, Integrated Tribal Development Agency, Rampachodavaram, which is 58 km from Rajamahendravaram in a dense forest.
“We are not thinking that we have done a great thing. She joined here to send a message that the area hospital in the tribal area too has all infrastructure facilities like a private one. We just wanted to raise confidence among people about the government hospitals,” said Mr. Kumar.
According to Ramesh Kishore, superintendent of the Rajamahendravaram General Hospital, who led the team of doctors to Rampachodavaram, Ms. Vijaya Krishnan had undergone cesarean section.
Veerabbai, Gynaecologist, Rajani Kumari, anaesthetist, attended on her. Ms. Vijaya Krishnan took maternity leave about a month ago and stayed in the ITDA Project Officer’s bungalow also in Rampachodavaram all through. It has not been renovated for over two decades now.
Speaking to The Hindu, she said: “We have overcome the initial fears about back-up facilities in the hospital and the neonatal care unit and mosquito menace. After seeing the facilities and attending to small problems here and there, we took the decision. Finally everything went off well.”
The couple have a two-year-old baby earlier and all the senior officials, including East Godavari Collector Kartikeya Misra conveyed their greetings for the new arrival.
Conscious decision
Last month, V. Keerthi, wife of Prakasam District Collector V. Vinay Chand underwent family planning operation in the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ongole.
“We took a conscious decision to undergo the surgical procedure at RIMS,” said the Collector then impressed with the facilities there.
There are about five big private hospitals in Ongole. M. Venkaiah, Assistant Professor at RIMS, who performed the procedure, had pioneered and popularised a new sterilisation technique in the State, points out the Collector who is also Chairman of the RIMS Hospital Development Committee.
The surgeon had performed close to one lakh laparoscopic surgeries, mostly on rural women, in the last 25 years and helped them get back to work in a couple of days as against the fortnight stay in hospital under the conventional procedure, he points out.
Doctors at the RIMS had also performed total knee replacement surgery with the latest surgical technique on a 60-year-old patient suffering from “bilateral osteoarthritis”.
It is a credit to the medical officials of the government hospital, said Dr. Venkaiah.