No executive committee meeting at Adilabad RIMS Hospital since 2016, RTI reveals

Adilabad: A decade has passed without a single formal executive committee meeting at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) and Government Super Speciality Hospital in Adilabad, according to records obtained through a Right to Information (RTI) application. The last recorded meeting held in May 2016.  

The finding comes as the hospital faces a growing patient burden amid a surge in seasonal illness cases. Patients aren't just coming from within the erstwhile Adilabad district either; several are travelling in from bordering villages in Maharashtra, given the limited healthcare options nearby.

An RTI application filed by a local transparency activist sought information on staffing numbers, safety-related manpower, minutes of past executive committee sittings, and how many posts still stand vacant. What came back painted a fairly stark picture. As per the response, the hospital presently has nobody assigned to fire safety duties, no one monitoring CCTV systems, no oxygen technicians on the rolls, and no dedicated staff running the sewage treatment plant. 

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According to a report by The New Indian Express, minutes of the 2016 meeting showed that the hospital required 151 teaching faculty members, including professors, associate professors, assistant professors and tutors. However, only 50 posts were allegedly filled, leaving 101 vacancies.

The activist has also raised concerns that one individual is holding both the Director's post and an additional charge of Medical Superintendent. He further claimed that the hospital administration has been slow to provide information even after being instructed to do so by both the State Information Commission and local district officials, and said he now intends to escalate the matter further with the Commission.

Notably, the 2016 meeting wasn't entirely unproductive while it lasted; it cleared a set of infrastructure proposals and agreed that staff expansion would be revisited in future sittings. Those follow-up meetings, however, appear to have never materialised. According to the activist, this gap has effectively frozen progress on both infrastructure upgrades and hiring at the facility for years.

Separately, around the time the RTI information came to light, the state's Health Minister held a meeting with elected representatives from the erstwhile Adilabad district to review matters connected to the hospital and healthcare delivery in the wider region.