PGIMER : State government of Punjab and Haryana fail to pay hospital maintenance cost worth Rs 8.74 crore, as per audit report

Chandigarh: Through an audit report, by a team of assistant audit officer Ashutosh on concluded on March 25, 2021 revealed that the Punjab and Haryana governments have failed to pay the maintenance costs for beds to Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) for many years. This caused the outstanding debt to reach a staggering Rs 8.74 crore.

Dr. Jagat Ram as the director, an audit team was led by assistant audit officer concluded the audit. The institute's account was checked for the time span of April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020 and it was done by the office of the Director General of Audit (Central), Chandigarh.

While inspecting the matter, the audit found that the Punjab and Haryana government have not paid the maintenance cost for beds for the year 2019-2020 and as of March 31, 2020, the Punjab government owes ₹7,71,84,000 to PGIMER and the Haryana government owes ₹1,03,00,000.

Over 35% of patients who get admitted to the premier health institute belong to Punjab alone. It serves patients from all over north India.

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PGIMER, financial adviser, Kumar Abhay told The Hindustan Times, "As per rules, the state governments have to pay the cost of maintaining the beds when a patient from their state gets admitted. But while the Haryana government usually releases the payment on time, a large amount of money is pending from Punjab government's side. Every year, we issue official letters to the state and seek release of arrears, but to no avail," said Kumar Abhay, financial adviser, PGIMER.

"Since PGIMER is a central government-funded institute, the officials had discussed scrapping the law that mandated payment of maintenance cost by respective state governments. The cost can be borne through the annual budget funded by the Centre instead, but no decision has been finalized yet," he added.

The senior officials of PGIMER stated that the institute was dedicated to providing top-notch medical care to all patients, irrespective of their domicile and the hospital's emergency department was operating at full capacity, with some patients having to be attended on stretchers due to an increased patient load from neighboring states.

"Though there is a rule to fix the quota of beds for Punjab and Haryana, but always more patients get admitted and treated at the hospital," an official said.

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According to the audit report, it came to the fore that around 711 patients admitted in various wards of different departments of the hospital, escaped in the course of their treatment without settling the bill which caused the institute a loss of ₹6.68 lakh including admission charges, medicines and lab test in the year 2019-2020.

Later, it was found out that some of the escaped patients were admitted in the wards of Drug De-addiction Centre, communicable disease and other serious-disease wards. "Such patients can bring harm to society at large without full treatment of the disease," the report read.

Upon being informed by the audit of the issue, the institute stated that the action to recover pending dues was forwarded to the medical records department. As far as the absconding patients are concerned, that has been treated as a medicolegal case and forwarded to the police.

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In the meantime, a total of 5,14 lakh drugs were observed to have expired between February 2017 and November 2019 as they weren't required.

"Due to improper assessment of requirement of medicines, the institute has suffered a loss of ₹5.14 lakh, which is not in consonance with tenets of financial propriety," the report read.

The institute clarified that the medicines are purchased in accordance with their requirements and with the approval of the drugs committee, which includes senior faculty members. Due to new and improved drugs being available in the market, as well as sudden changes in prescription and treatment patterns, an excess quantity of medicine remained and expired.