KOLKATA, OCTOBER 18, 2004
TNN

It's a call for the sons of soil. City-based private hospitals desperately want them back home to run the super-specialty centres that are coming up in the healthcare boom.

The Advanced Medical Research Institute (AMRI) has already roped in five oncologists for its new centre to be opened by the end of this year.

And Apollo Gleneagles has brought in about 20-25 specialists from abroad, most of them Bengalis.

AMRI is also looking for experts in endoscopic neurosurgery. The hospital's hunt for local talent ended in disappointment; all the better specialists were occupied elsewhere.

"There are many doctors who want to come back to Kolkata. They had stayed on in foreign countries for lack of opportunities here. Now, with so many hospitals coming up in Kolkata, there is enough incentive for them to return. Besides, the lure of the home is always there," a top official of a private hospital said.

Lack of opportunities has always been a problem in the state. Compared to a state like Maharashtra, which has 46 medical colleges Bengal has only nine. Even government hospitals are feeling the pinch. There is a severe shortage of specialists in neurology, urology and nephrology. In the rest of the departments, the state just about manages.

"The situation cannot be compared with any other place. Doctors who have passed out from here are doing extremely well in other places. If we could produce more doctors here then we need not look elsewhere," said Rupali Basu, GM of Wockhardt Hospital and Kidney Institute which has lined up gastro-enterology and cardiology centres.

Post-graduate medical students, however, eye it as an alternate to working with government hospitals. "The infrastructure is definitely going to be better and we won't have to handle 200 patients in outdoors.

So much politics has crept into government hospitals that it is difficult for anyone to give their best," said a PG student in orthopaedics.