AIIMS exodus on,eight more quit

Two doctors on foreign fellowships,Dr Vinay Gulati and Dr C Venkata Karthikeyan,associate professors in the departments of Medicine and ENT,resigned after returning to the institute. AIIMS sources said several doctors sent on foreign deputations chose not to return. Dr A K Hemal,former HoD of Urology,quit last year after “being on extraordinary leave in the US since 2007”.

One of the doctors who quit AIIMS,and now works at a private facility in the US,said: “Once you have worked in a hospital in the West,learning and teaching without bureaucratic hurdles,where there is a team-based approach to patient services and encouragement for research,it becomes difficult to come back. Over the years,AIIMS has become entwined in administrative hurdles,politics over promotions,overburdened faculty members and inertia to adoption of new ideas and equipment.”

Institute rules stipulate that a doctor who leaves while on a foreign assignment must pay a bond of Rs 5 lakh for the resignation to be accepted. “Only a single doctor,Dr Bera,is still to pay this bond. So technically,his resignation has still not been accepted. But for doctors from specialised disciplines who want to settle abroad,this amount is clearly no deterrent,” a senior official said.

Of 39 faculty members who were declared “unfit for promotion” in November last year,three have already resigned,including Dr Bera and Dr Sunder. Dr Maneesh Singh Sharma,assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery,too is said to have submitted his resignation,though it has not reached the administration.

Dr H H Dash,chief of neurosciences,took voluntary retirement,joining the league of HoDs who have quit in the last five years. AIIMS sources said he he has been asked to head the same department in a leading private hospital but Dr Dash did not confirm if he had been made such an offer.

“I am 62 years old and I am tried of working in a government set-up. So I chose to move on. What is so wrong about it?” Dr Dash said.

Dr Arvind Kumar,professor in the Department of Surgery,quit soon after his promotion as professor to set up a department in Robotic Surgery at Sir Gangaram Hospital in March. “I performed 70 robotic surgeries at AIIMS and the institute will always be my mother. But I could not work as much as I wanted. My patients had to wait nine months to get an appointment for surgery. The 9-to-5 work culture was a limitation as was the time allocated to me to operate the instrument. I only had it for once a week and could hardly do one case per week.”

Dr K S Reddy,professor and former HoD of Cardiology,who had not been “physically present” in AIIMS for seven years but continued to be on its rolls after he was sent on deputation to the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI),took voluntary retirement earlier this year.