Assam Medical College and Hospital: Letters to The EDITOR

Assam Medical College and Hospital

I visited one of my cousins hospitalized in a paying cabin of the Assam Medical College and Hospital [AMCH]. I was very much complacent about the condition of the paying cabins of a government-owned Medical College, that too one of the Oldest Medical Colleges of Asia. Silently I was under the impression that the Medical Colleges in Assam under the dynamic leadership of the concerned minister has assumed a clean and flawless image. But this speculation of mine received a severe setback when I visited the paying cabin. It is learnt that like the one I visited, the other cabins are also in a bad shape. There are no curtains in the cabin, patients have to purchase tube-lights or other bulbs as the ones in the cabins are out of order, flush in the toilet is not serviceable, kitchen is there but facilities are not. We could view the dumping of garbage here and there in the precincts of the hospital. We fail to understand, why the garbage is allowed to accumulate instead of cleaning it on a day-to-day basis. In addition, the places opposite Surgery Department are littered so much so that the atmosphere of the area is fraught with nauseating smell of urine. There are also reports on shortage of doctors, nurses etc. But it must be conceded that the state of affairs has become much better than what it was a few years back. That should not be a point for complacence and the minister concerned would do well to take concrete steps to do away with the anomalies confronting AMCH.

Ashok Bordoloi,

Dibrugarh.