For breakfast, KEM docs get plateful of woes

Breakfast like a king they say, especially if you don’t have to pay a king’s ransom for it. But if you are a resident doctor at KEM Hospital in Parel, forget about starting your day with a healthy and nutritious meal.

The intern doctors at KEM hospital get their breakfast at a subsidised price of Rs10. But that’s all there is to it.

The nutritional value of the food, doctors say, is very low to be considered as the most important meal of the day. Besides, the contract with the last caterer expired in March, after which the doctors are not getting any breakfast.

Now, the doctors want the hospital to make sure that the new caterer provides them with healthy food, even if it costs a little more.

“We have asked the administration to provide us with breakfast of Rs20,” said a doctor on condition of anonymity.

The doctor said the accounts department of the BMC had refused to extend the contract of the previous caterer without the tendering process, thus leaving them with no option but to spend from their own pockets.

The scheme was introduced by Dr Sanjay Oak, dean of KEM, last year for the 950 resident doctors. The civic body had appointed Satish Manohar Jadhav Caterers to supply breakfast for Rs10 to the doctors.

Oak said, “We are preparing a tender for the new caterer and will table it in the standing committee soon. It will take a few more weeks.”

Agreeing that the breakfast given to the resident doctors wasn’t nutritious enough, Oak said, “Doctors deal with thousands of patients every day and they are very susceptible to contracting contagious diseases like Tuberculosis. It is necessary for them to have healthy and nutritious food to build their immunity to diseases.”