23 July 2011
By, Umesh Isalkar
Pune, India
“All doctors, practising allopathy, ayurveda, homeopathy or for that matter any other branch of medicine within the limits of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will have to keep a record of all pregnancies confirmed at their units and submit the monthly report.
The civic body is committed to effectively implementing the PCPNDT (Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques) Act and involving private practitioners is just a step in this direction,” R R Pardeshi, medical officer of health (MoH), told TOI on Friday.
Vaishali Jadhav, assistant medical officer of health and city appropriate authority for PCPNDT Act, said, “Every private practitioner will have to submit the report to the civic body on the fifth of every month. Four medical officers of the PCPNDT Cell will visit the practitioners in their jurisdiction and hand over the registration form, the model form – on which the monthly report is to be submitted, and a format guiding them on how they should maintain a record of pregnancies confirmed at their units.
The entire work is likely to be operational by August 1.”
The registration form will include all the information of a doctor – residential, clinic’s and hospital’s address, qualification, phone number and registration number given by the medical council, etc. The monthly report to be submitted by the doctor comprises information like patients referred for obstetrics sonography, number of patients referred for medical termination of pregnancy (MTP), weeks of pregnancy when MTP was conducted (less than 12 weeks and more than 12 weeks), etc. The record to be maintained by private practitioners should include information like name of the pregnant women and detailed address, obstetric history, doctor’s name and address of the sonography centre referred to, weeks of pregnancy, whether MTP was advised, whether MTP was conducted and patients’ signature.
“All the three formats will be given to private practitioners. The exercise will reveal how many pregnant women are registered with doctors in a month, the antenatal care they are receiving and the sonography tests undergone. This will make it possible to keep a check on sonography centres also. Any discrepancy found in the record kept at the private practitioner’s clinic and the form F (filled by pregnant women before going for sonography) maintained at sonography centres will be easily traceable. This will automatically preclude the misuse of sonography machines,” Jadhav added.
Meanwhile, city doctors have also called for a broader strategy to arrest female foeticide and have demanded that that expectant mother and relatives who insist on sex-determination test should be penalised by law.
“There should be a central register of all the pregnant women. The register should be maintained by the local selfgoverning bodies. This register should begin from the time of confirmation of pregnancy in the early stage,” said Avinash Bhondwe, former president of Indian Medical Association, Pune branch, and General Practitioner’s Association (GPA).
“The women confirm pregnancy at any one of the four places – their family doctor, gynaecologist, pathology laboratory by urine pregnancy test or a sonography clinic where the pregnancies are detected. The reporting of the pregnancy should be made mandatory for all these doctors and the women also,” Bhondwe said.
“People not doing the necessary registration of their pregnancy should not be allowed to get the birth-certificate by these institutes. Everybody knows how important a birth certificate is, and hence, registration will be done by everyone, with some probable initial resistance,” he added.
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