Chennai: Govt doctors have objected health department’s move to secure gold rings for newborns in hospitals through grilled storage enclosures and anchored cupboards, urging govt to instead use banks to hold and distribute the rings.The service doctors and post graduates association said the proposed hospital-based arrangement for ‘Thai Maaman Thanga Mothiram Thittam’ could draw doctors, nurses and hospital administrators into gold custody, security and transport work.In a representation dated Aug 21 to Health Secretary Darez Ahamed — released to the media on Monday — the association said banks already had the “branch, vault, and cash-in-transit infrastructure” needed to distribute the rings, without diverting medical and paramedical staff into gold-custody duties.The intervention came hours after a separate Aug 21 communication in which health department asked public works department (PWD) to install mild-steel grill enclosures around storage cupboards at 107 hub institutions, anchor the cupboards to floors and walls, and secure storage rooms by Sept 5. PWD engineers have been asked to coordinate with medical college hospitals, district headquarters hospitals and sub-district hospitals to complete the work.Under the scheme, govt plans to give a 1g gold ring to every eligible newborn delivered in a government health institution. The programme is to be implemented through 107 high-load comprehensive emergency obstetric and newborn care (CEmONC) centres. The association said the hub-and-spoke system envisaged under govt order would require govt health institutions to take custody of the rings, secure them and move them from hub CEmONC centres to spoke delivery points.Using a model district with two hubs, 25 spokes and 25,000 deliveries a year, it estimated that the hospital-based system would require strongrooms and vaults, CCTV and biometric systems, security personnel, insurance and armoured cash-in-transit vehicles. It placed the annualised security and logistics cost at about ₹84.2 lakh, an estimate that has not been independently verified.The representation said a dean, medical superintendent or chief medical officer at a hub, along with medical officers and nursing superintendents at spoke facilities, could be assigned gold-custody responsibilities in addition to their clinical and administrative duties. “Layering dual-key vault custody and consignment-register duties” on clinical administrators would divert attention from CEmONC services and routine patient care, it said.Instead, the association proposed a memorandum of understanding with scheduled banks. Under its preferred model, hospitals would record the delivery in PICME and issue an Aadhaar- or RCH ID-linked entitlement certificate at discharge. Beneficiaries could then collect the ring from an empanelled bank branch or a business correspondent point in remote areas.The group also proposed a fallback model in which banks would retain custody and transport rings to hospitals, while health workers would verify eligibility and hand over the benefit. It said this would still avoid the need for hospitals to build fresh vaults, install surveillance systems and maintain dedicated armed security.
