SHILLONG, Jan 9: The North East Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (NEIGRIHMS) is being equipped with eight state-of-the-art, modular operation theatres to address the problem of backlog surgery cases.
Nalin Mehta, the institute’s director admitted to the backlog and said: “The good news is that we have eight new modular operation theatres (OTs) nearing completion. We should be able to deal with the backlog in the next couple of months.”
He said it would be difficult to give a tangible number of backlog cases or say if NEIGRIHMS is overburdened or not.
“The number of patients waiting to be operated on is far in excess of the capacity
of an institute like AIIMS, New Delhi that has a large number of OTs running 24×7 and many faculty members,” he said.
As a premier institute in the Northeast, NEIGRIHMS gets a lot of patients and there has been a waiting list, Mehta said.
He claimed to have increased the number of OTs to reduce the backlog after he joined as the NEIGRIHMS director.
These are operating virtually every day, he said.
He pointed out that it was difficult for routine patients to come to NEIGRIHMS during the COVID phase and the OPDs and OTs were shut down in some institutions.
Many patients have been expressing concern over the waiting period for surgeries to be conducted at NEIGRIHMS.