Aliya Abreu
PANAJI
With a controversial second medical college for Goa on the cards, the eradication of malaria and the next step in the everlong process of recruitment at the Goa Medical College and Hospital (GMC) set to be put into motion, Goans can look forward to a progressive year in the health sector in 2020.
Health Minister Vishwajit Rane has promised a slew of new projects for Goa, and it is to be seen how these promises will play out. For starters, Rane proposes in the field of medical science, what Goa has never witnessed before: a second medical college, and this time, a private one. Goa is already home to four non-government-run engineering colleges, and while the intake of students at the GMC had increased over the years, the number of medical colleges had stayed at one.
If the said project is commissioned as planned in the first few months of 2020, then medical science aspirants can look forward to a doubling of the medical seats in Goa in a couple of years, with an intake of 500, up 250, from the current intake at the GMC. Of these, Goan students will benefit from the mere 30-40 seats more.
It will be remembered that an earlier attempt to set up a private medical college in Goa in the 1980s under then CM Pratapsingh Rane was scrapped after students opposed the move.
Besides this, Goans will lso be waiting with bated breath for the completion of the super-specialty block, next to the GMC at Bambolim. While Rane had expressed confidence earlier this year that the block would be completed by December 2019, it comes as no surprise that it is not ready yet, and the new completion date has been set for mid-2020.
While the multi-storeyed block did not make headlines for non-completion in 2019, it, however, found space in the local news, notably “The Goan”, for all the wrong reasons: in June-July, close to 50 cases of malaria were detected at the block among the outstation construction labourers working there, posing a serious health threat to the adjacent GMC and indirectly to the state.
While health officials struggled to control the situation and keep it hush-hush, doctors were also furious that before the incident there were no checks being conducted for the labourers who entered the state. Some doctors fired off a letter to the dean Dr Shivanand Bandekar asking that action be taken to control mosquito breeding by clearing out water bodies on the GMC as well as the Dental College campus. The Health Secretary J Ashok Kumar himself got involved and is reported to have directed a special team to be set up to monitor the area on a day-to-day basis.
Following the incident, the 500-600 labourers living on site were screened on the same day to arrest the spread of the vector-borne disease. One can only hope that following the scare, there will not be a repeat performance of the same in 2020. In fact, Dr Anant Palekar, deputy director of the National Vector Borne Disease Control programme in Goa has gone on record to say that the department aims to eradicate malaria from the State completely by December 2020.
But the vector-borne disease that had Goans truly troubled in 2019 was not malaria, but dengue, with a number of deaths from dengue-related causes sending shock waves amongst all circles of society. The death that made the establishment sit up and take note, however, was that of
24-year-old Yash Salgaonkar from Miramar, a distant relative of a former minister from Porvorim.
Following Yash’s death, the Health Department, which had till that point claimed that controlling the spread of dengue was not in their hands, went into overdrive, with Rane announcing the formation of an inter-department committee with top-level bureaucrats to help tackle the dengue menace.
The dreaded disease claimed most number of lives in the port town, Vasco. A 16-year-old girl died as recently as November. Her death was the fifth suspected dengue death from Vasco this year. It seems dengue has taken over as the new malaria in Goa.
Meanwhile, among other things to look out for in the health sector this year is the completion of the recruitment process for the 1000-odd posts advertised at the GMC. The Health Minister has, for the time being, put the onus for the same on Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, after a tug-of-war of sorts between the two erupted in September 2019. While Rane had put into motion the recruitment process for the posts, Sawant suddenly put a spoke in the wheel in September-October, setting up a staff selection committee and making it clear that all recruitment needed to be directed through the said committee.
In December 2019, Rane requested the CM to give time till December 31 to get things in order. He admitted though that the GMC is reeling from a shortage of staff, so hopefully, 2020 will bring some relief to not only the hospital, but eager youth who had queued up to apply for the posts, travelling kilometres for the same.
