NEW DELHI. If you are suffering from urine, skin or kidney related ailments and wish to get yourself treated in AIIMS , then forget about getting any appointment in near future. You may have to wait for a year to get a consultation with concerned doctor .

Situation is so bad that forget getting date for a complicated surgery, patients should consider themselves lucky if they get an OPD appointment within a year.

The appointments in urology , nephrology and skin divisions are already booked for the year. The registrations are full after AIIMS recently started online booking system. More than one crore patients have booked a session online so far.

Patients who need urgent attention, but are unable to get appointments, are now moving to private hospitals for treatment.

“I am suffering from skin allergy. As I can’t wait for one year, I have decided to go to a private clinic,” Pammi Rathore told our reporter.

There are similar cases like Rathore in orthopaedic department, where patients are struggling to get a look in.

However, things aren’t this gloomy in some other departments like cardiology, gastro surgery, neurology , paediatric surgery etc where one can easily get appointments.

The AIIMS faculty has laid the blame for this mess on online system, which according to them is not reliable. Doctors say that the biggest drawback of online booking is that patients are taking appointments on their own where as AIIMS works on a “referral system”.

“Patients need to be referred to get a consultation with our doctors. This is to ensure our doctors don’t end up wasting time on small ailments,” a doctor told our reporter.

Due to online booking, patients don’t end up in the departments where they ought to be. A person with headache gets referred to neurology section when the cause of the pain is weakness in eyes,” he added.

The OPD building of AIIMS was constructed in 1960 and hasn’t been expanded since then. The hiring of doctors hasn’t happened at a pace matching the growth in number of patients.

“If an OPD appointment takes so much time, when will the concerned patient get operated if he requires a surgery?” asked a professor from orthopedic department.

As per AIIMS authorities, many patients don’t come even after booking a slot online. Keeping this in mind, AIIMS has decided to allow only one-month advance bookings.

“50% appointments will be done online, 30% would be reserved for direct walk-ins to OPD, and remaining 20% would be done through reference,” said a source from AIIMS administration.

Content courtesy: Navbharat Times

Read the story in Hindi here

