Srinagar: The Government of India sponsored scheme Biomedical Equipment Management and Maintenance Program (BMPP) is still way off at the hospitals in Kashmir valley as the Health department is yet to implement the scheme despite a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the Health Department and the successful bidder in March this year.
The scheme introduced by Government of India three years back but launched in J&K last year after delays, even as 50 percent of bio-medical equipment has been left dysfunctional at government-run hospitals and health centers over the years.
However, the implementation faced further delays, the latest being failure to finalise mapping of biomedical equipment at health institutions within the deadline.
“The mapping of equipment had to be finalized in August this year because the officials of National Health Mission finalized the tender and project formalities with the successful bidder in June. But, the process faced delay of two months making the hospitals to suffer for the want of machinery equipment,” an NHM official said.
“We are facing a serious issue of non-functional equipment in all the hospitals. From a simple microscope to ventilator and X-ray machine, hundreds of equipment and apparatus are lying defunct for want of maintenance. It is a huge burden on our healthcare system because we are unable to provide hassle-free facility due to lack of essential diagnostic and imaging facilities,” the official rued.
Under BMMP, support is provided to state governments to outsource medical equipment maintenance comprehensively. Subsequent to inventory mapping, Request for Proposal (RFPs) and tenders were rolled out to award maintenance contract for the respective states.
So far, nearly 20 states have outsourced the maintenance reducing dysfunctionality rate by about 25 per cent.
Director NHM, Bhupinder Kumar said the program will start working next year as the equipment mapping will still take some more time to finalize.
“We have already compiled the inventory of 16000 machines in different hospitals of Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir. These come under the biomedical equipment category,” he said.
According to Kumar, the vendor has already completed mapping in Jammu and Ladakh while some hospitals of Kashmir were pending.
“We will complete the exercise soon and compile the data. It will help us to monitor the functioning of hospital equipment and repair on timely manner,” he said.

Manzoor ul-Hassan