AIIMS-Delhi to hire PSU to buy medical devices

NEW DELHI: To free its faculty and other staff from procurement-related work, AIIMS has decided to constitute a committee to engage a government agency or a public sector undertaking (PSU) for buying medical equipment.

An office memorandum, issued by director M Srinivas, stated that the 10-member committee would examine the benefits and modalities of engaging a government agency or PSU. Due to the shortage of technical and trained personnel, the clinical faculty are spending a lot of time in procurement-related activities, which is eating into their time for patient care, teaching and research. There is also no biomedical engineer or similar technical staff in the store cadre to support the procurement of complex medical equipment in line with the current best practices globally. Since outsourced staff are mostly handling procurements, AIIMS has decided to engage a procurement support agency (PSA).

Recently, the Union health ministry has engaged a PSU for three central government hospitals in Delhi. This initiative will help in expediting the procurements as the PSA will be contractually bound by strict timelines and will also improve core storekeeping functions by freeing the existing staff from procurement-related activities.

Officials said that since the PSU would have a database for procuring medical equipment from across the country, this would help in quicker finalisation of specifications and better benchmarking of prices, which could, in turn, result in high efficiency and better prudence in procurement.