Sinduja Jane By Express News Service CHENNAI: The Directorate of Medical and Rural Health Services is planning to conduct street-by-street inspection across the State, to identify unregistered clinical establishments. Officials said this would be the first time the State will collect comprehensive data on all hospitals, clinics and laboratories. In 2018, the government enacted the Tamil Nadu Clinical Establishment Act, which mandated every hospital, clinic and laboratory, to register with the health department. The deadline for this was November 30. The officials said those who failed to apply or whose application was rejected should be closed down by November 30. But since there is no proper data available on clinical establishments in the State, officials said they are unable to take action. "Only if we have data, we can say how many hospitals are registered and how many failed to do so even after the deadline expired. Only then we can take action. But, since there is no data, the officials are left only with the option of conducting street by street inspection to find the violators," a health department official told Express. "During such inspections, if we find any establishments that is not registered, we will give them two more days to complete the process," the official added. The officials are also planning to get hospitals' data from the Union Health Ministry, which has begun the project of mapping of the hospitals across the country. The Health department had introduced the Tamil Nadu Clinical Establishment Act, 2018, to streamline functioning of hospitals and also to control quackery. Under this Act, all establishments, including Indian Medicine and Homeopathy clinics, hospitals and laboratories, both private and government are mandated to register with the government. The officials told Express that from June 1, 2018, till first week of October this year, 32,678 clinical establishments applied for licence. Among them, licence was given to 2,483 hospitals and clinics. The verification was completed for over 7,000 establishments. In Chennai, licence had been issued to only around 60 hospitals. The clinical establishments which applied for licence and verification process is pending, can be considered as registered.

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