BMC’s largest hospital has only one intensivist

KEM Hospital struggles to fill vacancies; doctors from medicine and anaesthesia departments manage ICUs

King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital, the busiest and the largest among the four tertiary care hospitals run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), has been struggling to fill the six vacant posts of intensivists for the last five months. This is despite the hospital administration giving out advertisements at frequent intervals and offering a higher remuneration each time.

“Our first advertisement for the six posts was issued five months ago. Only two doctors turned up for the interview of whom one agreed to join us,” a senior official from Parel-based hospital said.

Desperate, BMC has decided to further increase the pay package to ₹2 lakh per month, the official said. “In our first advertisement, the salary mentioned was ₹1.10 lakh. We hiked it to ₹1.50 lakh in the second advertisement. We have now decided to further raise it in the hope that we will receive applications.”

An intensivist or a critical care medicine expert is a certified physician attending to patients in the intensive care units (ICUs). The hospital has 284 ICU beds. “In the absence of intensivists, we are pulling out doctors from the medicine and anaesthesia departments to manage these critically ill patients,” the official said

The official added that the organ donation programme is also getting affected. “Intensivists are trained to identify brain dead patients in the ICUs.”

Explaining the hesitancy by doctors in joining the hospital, a doctor who had earlier worked with a BMC-run facility, said, “There is a shortage because critical care medicine experts do not opt for this branch as it involves a lot of emergencies. The existing doctors prefer private hospitals over BMC as the pay package is better and there is flexibility in choosing the duty shifts. There are other regulations too in BMC which are very discouraging.”

In 2018, a dearth of doctors to manage ICUs led to BMC outsourcing manpower for its 16 peripheral hospitals. However, the civic body decided to roll back its decision after an FIR was registered against the trustees of Jeevan Jyoti Charitable Trust for allegedly recruiting unqualified and bogus doctors.

While BMC has decided to train its doctors in critical care medicine to tackle the crisis, it has allocated 100 ICU beds in SevenHills Hospital, Marol. The announcement was made on Sunday and since then, the hospital has seen 23 admissions.