Hubballi: Chitaguppi Hospital, one of the major hospitals run by civic authorities in Hubballi is crying for attention due to lack of adequate doctors.The sanctioned strength of doctors at the hospital is 23, but currently the number of doctors is only 15, including Ayurvedic doctors. Earlier, to overcome this shortage, HDMC’s health department had invited applications from interested doctors to serve in the hospital, but received no response.Now, the department is contemplating to write a Karnataka Institute of Medical Science ( KIMS ) requesting it to provide doctors or any number of senior post graduate students to attend to emergency cases during night time.HDMC medical officer Dr Prabhu Biradar said, “Despite having all basic equipment, we are looking for doctors since a year. We have only 15 doctors, of them three are permanent while 12 are on contract. To overcome this shortage, we are now seeking help from KIMS.”“We did not receive any response to advertisements seeking job applications from doctors. We have recruited some Ayurveda doctors who approached us in response to our ad. The hospital needs a gynaecologist, anaesthetist, paediatrician and a surgeon but we are not getting anyone,” he added. To overcome this shortage, we wrote to KIMS twice, but KIMS refused to depute doctors citing they too have a shortage.“Now we require at least MBBS doctors to smoothly run the hospital 24 hours a day. We can do it if KIMS or any other medical college provides us senior PGs. We have decided to request KIMS authorities and SDM College to provide us senior PGs to run Chitaguppi Hospital,” said Dr Biradar.Why the shortage?According to sources, doctors demand a huge salary even for temporary service but HDMC’s health department wants full time doctors. Super specialist doctors too are demanding a huge salary and that too just two to three hours of work per day. Hence the health department is unable to find a permanent solution,” sources added.When contacted, deputy commissioner Deepa Cholan said, “We will soon have a meeting with KIMS director and district health officers to discuss about strengthening HDMC’s hospitals by appointing more doctors.”

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