<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It is most unfortunate, the Department of Health & Family Welfare(DoHFW) has got its tangled in a series of controversies that speak poorly of how the crucial department is being run. Even as Nagaland is faced with huge crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, over 1000 employees under National Health Mission(NHM) administered by the DoHFW have resorted to ‘indefinite cease work’ from June 14(Sunday). The NHM employees under the banner of National Health Mission Employee Association Nagaland(NEAN), are on contract service since 2005. A majority of them have been in continuous service for at least ten years or more. The preparations for COVID-19 were smooth, much hyped but hugely untested. However, there remained shortage of doctors, nurses and health assistants and therefore, containing COVID-19 would be nothing short of herculean especially when thousands of returnees have been placed at various quarantine and hospitalisation of rising number of COVID-19 cases at various district hospitals. The shortage of doctors, nurses etc was highlighted earlier by the Nagaland Inservice Doctors’ Association(NIDA), which disclosed that there were only 51 specialists or only 23% of norms as prescribed by the Indian Public Health Standards(IPHS) in all 11 district hospitals. Also there were only 63 Non-Specialist doctors or 52% of IPHS norms and 200 staff nurses or 28% of IPHS norms in all the 11 district hospitals. NIDA maintained that as per IPHS norms, the state requires 207 specialists, 119 Non-Specialists and 645 staff nurses for all the 11 district hospitals. With COVID-19 cases rising and testing facilities still inadequate to dispense with over 5000 returnees in quarantine centres, the need for more medical doctors and health workers to manage the emergency situation has been warranted. While appointing doctors to mitigate the shortage under the plea of current pandemic, the DoHFW only managed to shoot itself on the foot when it regularised the services of 19 doctors on contract. This was followed by another order wherein 27 doctors who had been appointed purely on contingency basis on May 27,2020 had their services regularised on June 13,2020. Even under normal circumstances, it takes a few years for a regular employee to get regularised. Another group of doctors- Nagaland Junior Doctors Association- have expressed outrage at the blatant act of regularising services of contingency appointees. NJDA said the DoHFW flouted its own criteria in its advertisement that no appointee(s) will have the right to claim for regularisation. Further NJDA questioned the P&AR department as to, under what service rule could a Class-I gazetted post be advertised purely on contingency for one year and then appointment for six months, then converted as regular post even before the candidates submitted their joining report(s)?If established rules and procedures can be subverted then they are fit to be consigned to the dust bin. ACAUT reminded that the High Court Kohima Bench had directed the government to not regularise contract employees who have completed three years of continuous service. The state appealed against this order but it was rejected in 2017. The DoHFW had used a flimsy pretext of “one time relaxation of laid down rules and procedures” to make these appointments and earlier, it made huge purchases through questionable means under the plea of COVID-19 pandemic and got dragged to the court through two PILs. These are symptoms that the DoHFW is suffering from the khushi-khushi syndrome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Khushi-Khushi epidemic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}