Pune:The ongoing strike of govt employees, including nurses, entered day two on Wednesday, showing a harder impact on new admissions and planned surgeries at the state-run Sassoon General Hospital (SGH). More than half the nursing staff at the hospital has respondedto the protest call of Maharashtra govt employees, pressing for several long-pending demands.BJ Medical College and SGH dean Dr Eknath Pawar said, “We are not sure when the strike will end, so we have issued a letter to Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC), the deputy director of health services, civil surgeon of Pune, district health officer, regional mental hospital, Ruby Hall Clinic and Symbiosis Nursing College to send us some nurses to fill in the shortfall. We have also issued a notice to our nurses to resume work or face action.”Over 600 nurses of the 900 deployed at SGH continued their strike on Wednesday. As a result, the number of surgeries, both major and minor, were affected. Dr Yallapa Jadhav, medical superintendent at SGH, said, “On Wednesday, between 8am and 4pm, we conducted 87 admissions, 26 major operations and 28 minor operations. We had 12 deliveries in the past 24 hours, of which eight were C-section deliveries. We also had 1,387 patients at the OPD and 1,022 at the IPD.“As per the hospital’s data, daily average out-patient department (OPD) numbers usually cross 1,555, while the in-patient department (IPD) sees 1,081 patients. While these numbers are relatively steady, surgeries and deliveries have gone down. On an average, the hospital performs 46 major surgeries daily and 166 minor ones. Daily admissions of new patients typically range around 192.The number of deliveries has gone down to half from 25 daily to 12 on Wednesday.Sassoon has now roped in a littleless than 300 nursing college students to manage the existing patient load, despite which new patient admissions have been severely hampered at the district’s largest tertiary care hospital. Both Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial Hospital and Aundh District Hospital authorities claimed they did not see much impact on patient care despite the nurses strike.State govt nurses joined the strike in response to a call made by theMaharashtra State Government EmployeesConfederation(MSGEC) to raise issues such as implementation of the Old Pension Schemes, and increasing the retirement age from 58 to 60 years.
