State to hire about 1.8K general duty medical officers in dists

KOLKATA: The state Health department has initiated the process of recruiting 1,800 general duty medical officers (GDMO) at the primary health centre (PHC) level to further boost up infrastructure in the districts.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee recently instructed the Health department to enhance infrastructure in the rural areas to combat any possible Covid surge in the future.

State government took up a massive recruitment drive to boost up health infrastructure. Health department had decided to induct around 6,000 vacant posts of health professionals, including GDMO at the district level hospitals.

It may be mentioned here that Swasthya Bhawan published notification for filling up the vacant posts of GDMO in February 2021.

The list of successful candidates was also published but the process was stuck due to various reasons. Earlier this year, the Health department had received more than 2,492 applications for the post of GDMO. There are around 3,974 posts for general nursing staff and 2,140 for BSC nursing posts. Earlier in 2020, the state Health department had announced the recruitment of over 1,500 medical officers and 9,000 nursing staff in order to mitigate the crisis of nursing staff members and doctors in the state-run hospitals, mostly in the districts.

Presently, more than 12,000 doctors are there in government hospitals. The number of doctors in government hospitals stood at 4,500 in 2011. The number of nurses has gone up to over 53,000 now. When the Mamata Banerjee government came to power, there were around 37,366 nurses in government health establishments.

The Chief Minister recently held a high-level meeting with the top health officials and instructed the latter to take various precautionary measures to combat any possible situation. She expressed her concern over the fresh spread of Covid in China and other countries. Following the instruction of Banerjee, the Health department set up a team of doctors headed by the state Health secretary for regular monitoring of the Covid situation.

The number of daily Covid infected cases in the state is much on the lower side.

Only 4 Covid positive cases were reported across the state on Monday while on Sunday the figure remained at 2. On last Friday the figure stood at 5 and 6 on Thursday. Active cases on Monday stood at 55. Around 696 Covid samples were tested across the state on Monday. State has so far performed 26,962,462 sample tests so far.