PG Times

Skilled professionals get higher salaries in private sector Lower-ranked Central government employees draw significantly higher salaries than their counterparts in the private sector but in the upper tier the reverse is true, says an IIM-Ahmedabad study commissioned by the Seventh Pay Commission. The ‘Salary Comparison Study’ conducted in October 2015 examined 40 professions, including nurses, teachers, scientists, electricians, drivers and clerks. It found the salaries of gardeners, clerks, receptionists and drivers lower in the private sector. For instance, a driver in the private sector typically earns around Rs. 12,000 a month, while an entry-level driver in government service earns around Rs. 25,000, including additional benefits and allowances. Even qualified professionals working with the government at the entry level are paid more. Government doctors with an MBBS degree get Rs. 80,500 a month while their counterparts in the private sector are paid only Rs. 50,...

Dr. (Col) Arvind K. Chaturvedi, Director, Prof. of Radiology, Head of Radiology & imaging, RGCI, Delhi, talks to PG Times about the newer methods that have been introduced to kill tumours without surgery. 1. Beside surgery, what are the options for treating liver tumour? The liver tumours can be either primary which means they are developing within the liver itself or they can be secondary meaning cancer is somewhere else but most of them spread at some point of time. Surgery has been one of the options to treat these tumours as there are emerging options that can destroy the liver tumour by various methods; one method is transarterial chemoembolization where you do a vascular circulation and make the catheter tip reach right up to the tumour and inject chemotherapy, which gets blocked there and destroys the tumour. In this there are no side effects of chemotherapy like hair loss or general symptoms. Another every emerging method to destroy liver tumours is rad...

A well-known pathologist in the state capital has been served a divorce notice by her husband, a radiologist, because she refused to abort the female foetus that she was carrying. The wife, Dr Prakriti Shukla, has now lodged a complaint with the state medical council and district magistrate, which is the appropriate authority for the PCPNDT Act. She has accused her in-laws of violating provisions in Pre-conception Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (prevention of sex selective abortions) or PCPNDT act. The registrar, state medical council has formed a committee to investigate the complaint. According to reports, Dr Shukla married Dr Tushar Ojha in December 2014. She became pregnant in July 2015 and was forced to undergo an ultrasonography test at her father-in-law’s diagnostic centre. “After the test, the behaviour of my in-laws and my husband changed. My husband asked me to abort the child and tried to convince me we were not in a position to have the baby. I found the behaviou...

Guest article by Rajeev Ahuja When Union finance minister  Arun Jaitley , in his latest Budget, announced the opening of 3,000 Jan Aushadhi stores in 2016-17 to make quality drugs available at affordable prices or making dialysis services available in all district hospitals, one appreciated his concern for the health sector. Important as these announcements are, one wondered where these initiatives fit in the larger vision for healthcare in the country. Unfortunately, this larger vision for healthcare, which is the subject matter of health policy, is sorely missing in our country. Not that we’ve had a good track record of National Health Policy (NHP). In fact, Independent India has seen only two NHPs—one in 1983 and a revised one in 2002. A draft NHP prepared by the health ministry in 2014 is currently in limbo. It’s a different matter that our health sector has also underperformed over the years (no correlation between NHP and the health sector performance implied here...

A hospital's intensive care unit (ICU), one would presume, would be among the quieter places in the city with only the periodic beeps of monitors and the occasional hiss of oxygen entering respirators. But a visit at some of the ICUs across the city would reveal a far noisier picture. The door of a narrow pediatric ICU in one of the leading public hospitals shuts, for instance, with a loud bang every time, while a private hospital's ICU witnesses such frenetic work-related exchange between resident doctors, nurses and support staff that it borders on noise for visitors. Several medical personnel agree that very few ICUs, NICUs or PICUs manage to stick to the World Health Organisation-prescribed 35 decibels during day time. "Noisy ICUs are known to prolong a patient's stay in the ICU and thus his or her recovery," said Dr Sanjith Saseedharan, who heads the ICU at S L Raheja Hospital in Mahim. A study done by his team, published in the Internati...

Promoting mutual cooperation in clinical, academic and research initiatives, Amity University and Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) on Monday signed an MoU at University Campus, Sector 125, Noida. The MoU was signed by Dr. B L Arya, Registrar, Amity University Uttar Pradesh and Dr. Nirupma Trehanpati, Additional Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, ILBS in the presence of Dr. Gayatri Ramakrishna, Associate Professor, Dept. of Research, ILBS; Dr. W Selvamurthy, President, Amity Science Technology and Innovation Foundation and Senior Officials of Amity. The MoU outlines strategic tie-up between the two Institutes in research and knowledge-sharing related to Biomedical Sciences. Addressing the gathering, Dr. W Selvamurthy said that Amity and ILBS has similar landmarks as both the Institutions are reckoned as reputed organizations at global level. He further said that the MoU will help to identify key joint and collaborative activities includin...

The leadership of the Medical Council of India, castigated by the parliamentary standing committee on health for failing in all its functions over the years and attracting the taint of corruption scandals, has now become a part of the newly-constituted governing board of the National Board of Examinations (NBE). The NBE conducts the national entrance examination for postgraduate and super-specialty courses. NBE has been without a board since Dr Srinath Reddy's tenure as its president ended in October, 2014. A health ministry notification dated June 17, and published in the gazette on June 20, named 14 people to the new NBE governing board. This has raised questions about the haste to reconstitute it at a time when the three-member expert committee appointed by the prime minister in April to examine the overhauling of medical education has not yet submitted its report. MCI is to be scrapped and overhauled as decided by the PM. In this context, several senior functio...