Nadda inaugurates IGRT, Robotic Centre in Chandigarh

Chandigarh: Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare J P Nadda Sunday inaugurated two patient care facilities -Image Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT) and Robotic Assisted Surgical procedure at PGIMER here.

Speaking on the occasion, the Union Minister stressed on taking advantage of digitalisation for providing better health services to patients in all the hospitals in the country.

"The digitalisation is top priority of the health ministry. We are trying to digitailise and take benefit of communications and that is on our high priority. In all hospitals, we are trying to see how we can give better patient services by using digitalisation," he said.

He laid emphasis on providing quality medicine at affordable rates besides making them accessible to all patients.

To a query on lab reports of private centres, he said that the ministry would look into the matter to strengthen in-house laboratory services in hospitals to allow patients to take its maximum benefit.

The minister inaugurated state-of-the-art patient care facility IGRT Linear Accelerator here at PGIMER campus for treatment of cancer patients.

This IGRT machine has components of advanced imaging technologies and software for the visualization of tumors and various organs which can help in reducing the volume of normal tissue irradiation while targeting only the tumor, said a PGI official.

Another patient care facility called Robotic Assisted Surgical procedure for management of various surgical diseases was also inaugurated by the minister.

Robotic Assisted Surgery offers the benefit of enhanced precision and meticulousness of tissue dissection and suturing with the help of three dimensional vision of the operative field with 10 times magnification.

Earlier, Nadda also chaired a meeting of the Institute body of Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) here in which several pending issues related to employees, sanctioning of finance for projects were discussed. Nadda is the President of the body.

Lok Sabha MP Prem Singh Chandumajra who is also a member of the Institute Body of PGIMER, sought opening of more OPDs for dealing with heavy rush of patients from neighbouring states.

He also raised the issue of opening of a satellite centre at Anandpur Sahib for reducing the burden of patients at PGI.

"I also demanded increasing the capacity of private rooms, raising the strength of staff and procuring more medical equipments for better handling of patients," he said.

He also pitched for fixing lowest rate of medicine for the benefit of patients.