Chhattisgarh to Introduce Cashless System in Government Hospitals from June 1: Singh Deo

Raipur: The Chhattisgarh Legislative Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution unanimously to allocate a total of Rs 5122 crore 8 lakh 71 thousand for the departments headed by TS Singh Deo including Public Health and Family Welfare, Medical Education, Commercial Tax, and the Twenty-Point Program Implementation.

Health Minister TS Singh Deo, while responding to the department’s funding demands in the Assembly, announced that from June 1, all government hospitals in the state will have a cashless system. Patients will not have to pay even one rupee for treatment, checkups, and medicines. OPD, IPD, medicines, and all types of diagnostic services will be provided free of cost to the residents of the state. 

Chief minister Bhupesh Baghel has given his approval to this announcement. He said that this cashless system will not only provide health as a right in line with the concept of universal health care, but it will also add another dimension to the state’s Nyay yojanas. This will complete the vision of a cashless government hospital.

He added that human resources play an important role in realizing the concept of universal health care. In the state, in the year 2017-18, the number of specialist doctors was 179, which has increased to 534 in the last 4 years. There has been a threefold increase in this in the last 4 years alone. In the last 4 years, the number of medical officers has increased from 1302 to 2413 and the number of dental doctors has increased from 67 to 222. He said that in 2017-18, the facility of dialysis was available only in three health centers in the state, which has now reached 29 health centers. This year, 42,000 dialysis procedures have been performed on kidney patients in these centers.