Nashik: The lone full-time psychiatrist of civic hospitals will now work on a honorary basis, making the patients wait longer for treatment.Psychiatrist Priya Rajhans will visit the hospital only thrice a week for two hours. She was a full time medical officer at JDC Bytco Hospital, Nashik Road. The Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) has recently given a honorary order to the psychiatrist.Although there is a similar treatment available at Civil Hospital, the wait period is longer due to the rush. Since the past few months several patients were forced to visit the Civil Hospital due to the absence of a psychiatrist at NMC-run hospitals.“In the last few months we did face some problems when we had to send patients who needed psychiatric treatment to the Civil Hospital,” said a Bytco Hospital staff. “The distance from Bytco Hospital to Civil Hospital is also long and at times patients insisted that we give them some temporary solution. But we had no option,” she added.She said that now with the psychiatrist returning as a honorary practitioner, things would hopefully return to normalcy again.“The medical practitioner had quit around the end of last year citing family reasons. She said that she would not be able to continue full time. But since she is the only psychiatrist and we need one, we asked her to continue on a honorary basis. Recently, we issued a honorary order to her,” said a senior NMC official.He said that as per the rules, honorary medical practitioners have to work six months for at least two hours for three days a week.On the two-hour period being insufficient to treat patients, another officer at Bytco Hospital said that things could be streamlined once patients know of the psychiatrist’s timings. “We do have patients for psychiatric treatment but the number is not unmanageable,” he said.Sources from the Civil Hospital said that they had to handle a lot of patients in the past few months as people from both rural areas and NMC hospitals came to them for treatment.

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