Act enforcement to hit 4,000 private clinic laboratories

Our Correspondent

Nurpur, December 21

The enforcement of the amended Clinical Establishment Act, 2010, by the state government is likely to affect 4,000 private clinical laboratories and render over 15,000 persons jobless.

The Government of India had amended the Act a few years ago and incorporated a new condition of having MBBS doctors for the registration of a clinical laboratory. The state government has started enforced the implementation of the Act following amendment, causing a lot of resentment among laboratory technicians of the states.

Sources said the state Health Department had started issuing notices to the clinical laboratories, in which owners were asked to either procure the registration certificate as per the Clinical Establishment Act, 2010, from the Chief Medical Officer to run their laboratories or close their establishments. They were also warned of penalty of Rs 25,000 if found running laboratory without the certificate.

They said earlier, the Himachal Pradesh Medical Council, Shimla, had granted permissions to private lab technicians to run private clinical laboratories by issuing registration certificates. “The state government has not filled even a single regular post of laboratory technician in government hospitals and any other health institutions in the past 15 years. Enforcing the condition of having MBBS doctors run private clinical laboratories has perturbed thousands of state technicians,” they said.

Gulab Thakur, state general secretary of the HP Medical Laboratory Technologists’ Association, while lamenting the enforcement of amended Act, said most of the states in the country, including neighbouring Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir, had declined to implement the Act, but the Himachal Pradesh Government had started implementing it. He said it would ruin the career of thousands of established entrepreneurs, who had set up their clinical laboratories by fulfilling government yardsticks.

Meanwhile, the HP Professional Medical Technicians’ Association, Kangra district unit, submitted a memorandum to Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh at Jawalamukhi and demanded revocation of the enforcement of the Act in the larger public interest.