J-K Chief Secretary Mehta stresses on offering online appointments at UT's hospitals

Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Secretary Dr Arun Kumar Mehta on Friday stressed on extending the facility of online appointments with doctors in the health institutions of the Union Territory.

He impressed the upon health officers to work for making this service available to the public within a month's time.

While speaking at the 12th Governing Body meeting of National Health Mission (NHM), Chief Secretary Mehta said that mentioned that the prior online appointments to patients are given in many premier hospitals in the country and the Department needs to bring their own system in sync with that to make the process of visiting a Hospital easier.

"A simple and efficient system available should be adopted," he said.

Chief Secretary also enjoined upon the officers to digitize the patient history and other legacy data so that the same is accessible round the clock. He also said that the convergence of data from Health care institutions, Anganwadi centres and educational institutions could make a database inclusive of all health details from birth to date for each person.

On the occasion, Chief Secretary Mehta also urged the officials to make it an objective to ensure 100 per cent digitization of the health records of all the individuals in the J-K.

In the meeting Secretary Health, Bhupinder Kumar and MD, of NHM, Ayushi Sudan gave a detailed overview of the functioning of the Department especially the National Health Mission (NHM), J-K.

During the meeting, it was mentioned that the utilization of funds from the last five years from 2018-19 has seen progressive growth with each passing year. It was revealed that out of the Rs 671.75 Cr amount of funds available in the year 2018-19, the percentage of utilization was 72 per cent. The same increased to Rs 900.64 Cr in 2022-23 with the percentage of utilization taking a quantum leap to reach 98.68 per cent for the previous financial year.

"The Governing Body also discussed the proposals of the NHM to ratify the State Programme Implementation Programme (SPIP) to the tune of Rs 1441.60 Cr for FY 2023-24, procurement of COVID essential Diagnostic and Drugs, Implementation of IT interventions like HMIS (e-SAHAJ) from District Hospitals and CHCs to Tertiary Care Hospitals. It also discussed maternity leave in favour of contractual female employees as per the existing labour laws and other HR-related issues for making the functioning of the mission smooth and efficient," the official statement said.