Vidyasagar hosp bags top national award

Kolkata: Vidyasagar Hospital became the best state general hospital in India by winning the top national award under ‘Kayakalp’ scheme in 2018-19 on key parameters like hygiene promotion and infection control. The award is also a milestone in its metamorphosis from a “veritable hell” (people of Behala avoided walking down the adjacent road for unbearable stench) to Bengal’s cleanest public hospital.

The transformation also brought back the middle class patients who had once stopped going there and opted for expensive private medical facilities.

Rekha Sengupta, a former state electricity board employee, is happy that her husband got rid of decaying teeth within an hour at the hospital.

“In the early 2000s, I had gone to the hospital for our party supporter’s emergency treatment. The situation was so bad that I could not stay there for long and shifted the patient elsewhere,” said education and parliamentary affairs minister, Partha Chatterjee, the key architect of the hospital’s transformation as the chairman of its Rogi Kalyan Samiti (RKS).

“In the past few years, the hospital has introduced several facilities, including X-ray, CT scan, USG, fair-price pathology and medicine shop,” said Sohini Chatterjee, assistant superintendent of the hospital.