Punjab to reopen 12 blood banks

In order to remove these shortcomings, the banks are being equipped with air-conditioners, refrigerators and power generator sets for round-the-clock cooling of the bank equipment and buildings. He hoped that these deficiences would be made up next month.

However, this would still leave 26 sick blood banks non-functional in Punjab as their licences have been withheld since they were operating with grave deficiencies. Before the closure, the state had 66 blood banks. Channy disclosed that an ambitious scheme to upgrade and extend buildings of 77 civil hospitals at a cost of Rs 9.80 crore has been prepared. These hospitals are situated in eight districts of Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana, Sangrur, Faridkot, Muktsar and Moga. The new construction there would start simultaneously in December next.

In addition, the PHSC would spend another Rs 14 crore to repair and renovate other 100 hospitals within next three months. Disclosing that sophisticated medical equipment worth about Rs 30 crore was lying non-functional in civil hospitals in Punjab, Channy said it has been decided to get these repaired on priority so as to put these costly machines to use of patients. Estimates have shown that this would require only Rs 1.25 crore to make this equipment functional.

The equipment lying out-of-use included ECG machines, defaburicators, bedside monitors and X-ray machines. The corporation, he said, had established direct contact with reputed manufacturers to undertake repairs and hoped that at least half of these repairs would be completed by the end of the year. All these hospitals, he revealed, were being equipped with necessary sophisticated equipment through national and international competitive bidding (ICB).