The government has plans to merge the three referral hospitals together and delink human resources from the Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC). It is to provide equal health services to everyone as an independent body.
The move will allow medical specialists to move from one hospital to another. The health minister informed this at the Friday meet today.
According to the health minister, the hospital is not able to send specialists to Monggar and Gelephu Regional Referral Hospitals with the current system.
Since Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital (JDWNRH) is also the teaching hospital, the Health Minister, Dechen Wangmo shared that most of the specialists have to stay at the national referral hospital training medical trainees.
“When we cannot send them, people have to come to Thimphu to avail themselves of health services from the specialists. When people come to Thimphu, they face accommodation problems and other unavoidable problems. So if we merge these three hospitals and delink from RCSC, we will have an authority to move specialists.”
Towards making human resource autonomy from the civil service, the government has already developed a concept plan. It will be submitted to the RCSC once the new commissioners join the office.
” About five to six years passed after granting autonomy to JDWNRH but still HR is not delinked. The biggest problem today is, even if we need to recruit a specialist, they cannot do it themselves and also sending doctors to other places. So, it has affected our health services especially in secondary and tertiary health care,” Health Minister Dechen Wangmo said.
The national referral hospital was granted autonomy in 2013.
