OPDs at AIIMS Jhajjar to begin from Monday

Inaugurating the new campus on Saturday, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the outreach campus will also house the country's national cancer institute, built at a cost of Rs 2,100 crore.

Azad said the new campus was completed four months after the foundation stone was laid in May.

"In 2011 alone, our main AIIMS campus saw 26 lakh OPD patients. This is a huge load and the infrastructure at AIIMS is bursting at its seams. As a result, patients have to wait for long periods for various procedures and services. We expect to treat around 25,000 OPD patients at the Jhajjar campus every month," he said.

AIIMS director Dr R C Deka said the new campus initially will have OPDs in paediatrics, gynaecology, medicine, surgery, orthopaedics and ophthalmology. "In the long term, it will be expanded to a full-fledged super-specialty teaching and research institute," he said.

AIIMS will outsource the laboratory tests at the Jhajjar campus to HLL Lifecare Limited, a public-sector unit of the Health Ministry.

In another first, the outreach campus pharmacy will provide free generic medicines in 194 drug categories to all patients for a month. The pharmacy has also been outsourced to the same company.

The 300-acre campus was donated free of cost by the Haryana government. It will also house a proposed national cardiac care centre. "We have asked for expression of interests (EOIs) from international consultants to draft the master plan for the campus. The cancer institute will have 600 beds. Once various departments are completed, the entire hospital will have 2,000 beds," Azad said.

The centre will be manned by doctors from AIIMS from 9 am to 1 pm on weekdays. "We will refer patients who need advanced care to government hospitals in Gurgaon and Bahadurgarh. If further specialisation is needed, we will refer them to the AIIMS main campus," Dr Shakti Gupta, medical superintendent of the outreach OPD, said.

Haryana government officials said the the top priority will be to improve connectivity to the campus, which is 17 km from Gurgaon.

Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said, "The Gurgaon-Badli Road will be made four-lane. The new campus will benefit patients from Haryana and states like Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh."

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