Bhubaneswar, March 25: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here is finally going to have a dedicated ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homoeopathy (Ayush) centre.

The 30-bed centre, which has both in-patient and outpatient departments, has been built over 3,000sqft. Initially, the centre will have in-patient facility for ayurveda and outpatient facility for homoeopathy. The Union health minister of state Jay Prakash Nadda will inaugurate the facility here tomorrow.

The patients here would also get an array of other additional services such as high-rated CT scan facility, digital radiography and mammography from tomorrow onwards. An administrative block and a DSA laboratory with intervention procedure will also be inaugurated for medical students.

The apex institute has spent nearly Rs 20 crore for providing all these services to the patients and the medical students apart from an eight-storey hostel building with 160 rooms in its residential complex just outside the main building of AIIMS.

"It is a long-standing plan of the institute to provide the Indian medicine facility to its patients. The process of establishing the centre has finished so as the recruitment of the medical officers and other staff members. The patients will be highly benefited by the service," said AIIMS director Ashok Kumar Mahapatra.

Mahapatra said five medical officers of ayurveda and homoeopathy would be deputed in the service of the patients at the new unit. In 2014, AIIMS recruited nearly three yoga trainers and was providing training to the patients. However, the administrators had then stopped the service due to a decrease in demand.

Though four years have passed since its inception in the state, the apex institute here is struggling to come up in its full form with several problems yet to be addressed. The major among them is the connectivity issue for those coming to the hospital for treatment.

Lack of public transport and a separate ambulance service remained a long-standing problem for the patients and other visitors. At present, there is only one city bus that operates from Master Canteen to the hospital.

Moreover, recruitment of faculties and doctors remained another daunting task for the institute as past records say that many selected candidates have shown reluctance to join, or in other cases the AIIMS did not get quality manpower.

"Recruitment is not an easy task, we need quality manpower to provide services to the patients as well as our students. In the later half of 2015, we notified to fill up nearly 250 posts in 41 departments. Nearly 1,200 candidates have applied and 900 have been called for interview. The final list is yet to come out," said a senior official of the AIIMS.

At present, of the 500-odd posts at the AIIMS, it has nearly 60 regular staff members and another 66 on contractual basis (54 senior residents, six demonstrators and six junior doctors)<>. Nearly half of its staff positions are lying vacant. According to records, the hospital had received nearly 2.81 lakh patients in its outpatient department in 2014, which came down to 2.69 lakh patients last year.

AIIMS officials admit that because of the dearth of doctors, the inflow of patients decreased last year. However, they are hopeful that once the new recruitments are made the institute will once again come perform to its capacity. At present, the hospital has a 200-bed in-patient facility, which it will increase to 450 beds in the near future.