Bathinda, October 16
Under the World Bank funded Integrated Disease Surveillance Project (IDSP), which is sponsored by the Government of India to monitor the incidence of communicable and non-communicable diseases in the state, Punjab has decided to enroll 142 private practitioners from each block in the state.
The project coordinator of programme, Dr Deepak Bhatia said this while talking to TNS here today. He was here to attend the sixth annual conference of the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM), Punjab chapter, held at the Adesh Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (AIMSR).
Dr Bhatia said that already 90 per cent of the health centres have been reporting their data of diseases to the IDSP. “Initially, it was very difficult to convince the private practitioners, private medical colleges and clinics to be a part of the IDSP. Slowly and steadily, we have managed to enroll 100 private doctors and aim to take this figure to at least 142, with one doctor for each block in the state,” he said.
The IDSP was started in the third phase in Punjab in 2007 as part of a World Bank project. Presently, Punjab ranks second in the country in terms of implementing the project successfully, while Gujarat occupies the top slot. In Gujarat, IDSP was started 15 years ago at the time of the plague outbreak in Surat.
He added that data collection plays an important role in forming health policies. “With the advent of IT-enabled services and deep penetration of telephony, collecting data has quickened and so has the pace of action taken to curb the epidemics. But we still have a long way to go to ensure that epidemics do not spread at all and we treat the first reported cases within no time,” he added.
He said that emphasis was also being laid on institutes like the Punjab Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Jalandhar, to share their informative data on the issue.
“The introduction of the Clinical Establishment Bill will make it mandatory for the private practitioners to share their data with the government and we are waiting for it,” he said.
Under the IDSP, there are four referral labs in 20 districts of the state, including Ludhiana, Amritsar, Faridkot and Patiala. The three being funded by the state government are at Moga, Bathinda and Hoshiarpur. Also, there are 2955 units registered with Punjab.
