The Bengal government on Saturday instructed state-run medical college hospitals to ensure that all employees wore identity cards and that no contractual employee was appointed without police verification.

The directives follow the alleged rape of a 13-year-old at SSKM Hospital on Wednesday by a former Group D employee, who was in the hospital uniform. The suspect, now a contractual employee at the NRS Medical College and Hospital, should not have been allowed inside SSKM as a uniformed employee.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee made a brief online appearance at the meeting, held between senior bureaucrats and medical college authorities, where the instructions were issued.

“The chief minister was not happy that someone not employed at SSKM had managed to enter a restricted area at the hospital. She asked the authorities of all hospitals to be more vigilant,” a senior official with a medical college in Calcutta said.

The safety directives issued at the meeting appear to have focused mostly on lower-rung contractual staff.

The hospitals have been asked to ensure that the private agencies deploying the contractual employees hold a roll call before the start of every shift to weed out any unauthorised proxies.

“The chief secretary and the health secretary spoke on the measures to be implemented. They said that all employees should have identity cards and must wear them at all times,” the principal of a medical college said.

There has been a longstanding order for everyone to wear their identity card inside state-run hospitals.

But, from doctors to Group D staff, almost no one now wears their identity card at government hospitals, as this newspaper reported on Saturday.

Officials at the helm of state-run medical colleges and hospitals said it was difficult for the gatekeepers to tell outsider from employee if no one wore their identity card.

As for background checks by the police being made mandatory, a medical college principal said that all recruitments in recent months had taken place after police verification. However, many of the old appointments had been made without background checks, the principal added.

The hospitals have also been told to ensure the monitoring of employees by their supervisors, an official who attended the meeting said.

Amit Mallick, the suspect, was arrested on Thursday on the charge of raping the teenage patient, who was at SSKM with her parents to see a doctor at the outpatient department.

State-run hospitals had adopted several safety measures, such as the installation of more CCTVs, after last year’s protests by junior doctors against the rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.

But the continuing assaults on women patients and medical staff have underscored that gaps still remain in security.

Chief secretary Manoj Pant presided over Saturday’s meeting for most of its duration, barring Mamata’s online appearance for a couple of minutes.

All the district magistrates, superintendents of police and district chief medical officers of health attended the meeting.

Officials said the chief minister had also sought a check to ensure that every hospital had fire safety certificates.