A hospital is not measured by the grandeur of its facade, the gleam of its corridors, or the scale of its construction. It is measured by the care it delivers to those who arrive at its doors – frightened, in pain, and placing their trust entirely in the hands of those within. A building without staff is merely a structure. It offers no comfort, conducts no surgery, and saves no lives. This fundamental truth appears to have been lost on those responsible for the woeful state of the Bone and Joint Hospital, Jammu – an institution that, two and a half years after its inauguration, remains without a single sanctioned post of its own. The hospital was conceived with a clear and legitimate purpose. GMC, Jammu, had long ago exceeded its sanctioned patient capacity. The burden of orthopaedic and trauma cases pouring in from ten districts of the Jammu division had become unsustainable. A dedicated Bone and Joint Hospital was the logical answer – a specialised facility that would decongest GMC and deliver focused care to some of the most vulnerable patients: accident victims, trauma cases, and those suffering debilitating musculoskeletal conditions. The intention was sound. The execution has been a quiet catastrophe.
What makes the situation particularly galling is that instead of being established as an independent institution with its own identity, budget, and sanctioned strength, the Bone and Joint Hospital was placed under the administrative umbrella of GMC Jammu. An already understaffed parent institution was then asked to lend approximately 200 members of its own stretched workforce to operationalise the new facility. A hospital reeling under a staff shortage was pressed into service to run another hospital. The irony is painful, and the logic, if any existed, entirely escapes reason.
The disparity with its counterpart in Srinagar renders the situation still more difficult to defend. The Bone and Joint Hospital in Srinagar operates with a sanctioned strength of over 2,400 staff members, including 16 professors. Jammu’s equivalent limps along with roughly 300 borrowed staff and a mere handful of faculty. Even more telling is that while GMC Srinagar’s staff strength was revised in recognition of growing patient loads, GMC Jammu has continued to function with the same sanctioned strength it held decades ago – despite facing comparable, if not greater, pressure. This is not an administrative oversight. It is a disparity that demands a frank and honest explanation from those in authority.
Two and a half years have now elapsed. Files have moved between the Health Department, the Principal of GMC, and the Finance Department. Queries have been raised. Clarifications have been submitted twice. And yet, not a single post has been sanctioned for the hospital. It is worth pausing on that fact. Jammu and Kashmir is frequently and rightfully celebrated as a leader in digital governance and the delivery of e-services. How, then, does a straightforward staffing proposal for an operational hospital take years to navigate interdepartmental queries? The answer, whatever form it takes, reflects poorly on the system.
Those at the helm must appreciate a crucial distinction: a hospital is not a Government office running from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. It is an emergency service operating without pause – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Patients do not schedule their trauma for convenient hours. Staff must work in shifts, and when those shifts are already stretched beyond capacity, patient care does not merely suffer – it fails. Running a hospital on a skeleton crew is not a temporary inconvenience; it is a dereliction of duty to the public.
One is compelled to ask: if the Bone and Joint Hospital was conceived after due deliberation, planned with a specific purpose, and inaugurated with a public ceremony, what precisely has changed in the intervening years to make the sanctioning of its staff such an intractable problem? Who owns this failure? Healthcare cannot be held hostage to bureaucratic inertia or, worse, to the kind of unequal treatment between regions that the current disparity suggests. The Government must act with urgency – sanction the proposed posts, release a dedicated budget, and equip this hospital to fulfil the very purpose for which it was built.
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