Patients watch TV at the hospital. Picture by Main Uddin Chisti

Dinhata, Oct. 10: Tom and Jerry are helping the children admitted to the Dinhata subdivisional hospital escape the boredom of confinement.

The district administration has gifted the hospital a television set, which has been set up in the paediatric ward and is showing only cartoon channels.

Later on, the hospital authorities and the subdivisional administration plan to bring in dolls and toys to effectively create a kids’ corner, the only one of its kind in a state-run hospital.

Dinhata subdivisional officer Kajal Bandyopadhyay said the television set was a gift for the young patients during the festive season. “Both the children and their mothers will be able to watch programmes on it,” he added.

“The fact that the children will be in a more cheerful mood will help them recover from their maladies faster,” said Kishalay Bikash Nayak, a child specialist attached to the hospital. “Moreover, a number of them coming from poor families will have an opportunity to watch cartoons for the first time in their lives.”

The set has been switched on at very low volume since last evening.

Pranab Roy, the superintendent of the hospital, said the children’s corner has been planned right beside the female ward. “We are soon going to have toys and dolls which the children can play with during admission,” Roy said.

Hospital sources said besides the television set and toys, the walls of the children’s corner will be painted with cartoon characters.

The idea for the kids’ corner had evolved at a meeting of the subdivision’s hospital patients’ welfare committee. Two prominent members of the committee, Congress MLA from Sitai Fazle Haq and Trinamul Congress MLA from Dinhata Ashok Mondol were both happy with the decision.

Haq, an MBBS, said such steps would help improve the overall condition of any hospital. His argument seemed justified when five-year-old Pooja Barman, admitted in the hospital for the past three days, said: “I am feeling lot better now with the cartoon programmes being shown on the television set.”