Limited Net facility for doctors in hospitals
There is no ease of surfing the Internet for the doctors at major government hospitals in the Valley. Most main hospitals here have set up a room and provided some computers where doctors can sit and surf the Internet. There is no Wi-Fi facility for them.
Doctors at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) at Soura in Srinagar, which is a tertiary care hospital, said the Internet access was being granted under the CCTV camera surveillance and they had to wait for their slots to surf the Net.
The government had, on December 31, decided to restore the Internet to the hospitals in the Valley, while the Internet facility in the rest of the Valley remains blocked since August 5 last year when the government scrapped the special status of J&K.
“There is no Wi-Fi facility and there is a LAN section at the hospital where we can go and surf the Internet and it is under the CCTV surveillance. Any doctor who goes to surf the Internet has to provide his employment code, phone number, name and address. Every student gets a 15-20 minute slot to access the Internet,” said a senior doctor at SKIMS.
Doctors have expressed their displeasure and said that they should not be made to wait for their turn to access the Internet. They said they should be provided the Wi-Fi facility in their rooms so that they could do their work without any hitch. Another senior doctor at SKIMS said they could not access the Internet in their rooms. He said instead the hospital had established a browsing section. “The Internet access is being provided under the CCTV surveillance. The employee is given a 15-20-minute slot to surf the Internet. The resident doctors also get 15-20 minutes to browse the Internet. The hospital administration has kept a separate browsing room with some computers for the faculty,” he said.
He said it was a broadband facility under surveillance.
Medical Superintendent, SKIMS, Dr Farooq Jan said: “We have kept 10 computers in our LAN office for junior doctors and junior staff. We have kept five computers for senior doctors and staff.”
He said the CCTV cameras were already installed in the hospital and not especially for this purpose. “A register is maintained of junior doctors and staff who access the Net,” he said. “It is an academic institute and we have to give time to our doctors to search the research papers so there is no time slot for Internet surfing for them.”
Meanwhile, Director, Health Services, Kashmir, Dr Sameer Mattoo, said the Internet was being provided to all major hospitals in the Valley. He said Wi-Fi and broadband was being provided to all hospitals, including Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital and SKIMS.
President, Doctors Association, Kashmir, Suhail Naik, said rural hospitals in the Valley had applied for the BSNL broadband facility and would be getting the facility in some days.
