The Directorate General of Health Services is going to make it mandatory for healthcare facilities to display their licence numbers on their signboards.

"We will issue an order1 [in this connection]. Those who will not display their licence numbers will face legal action," said Prof Ahmedul Kabir, additional director general (administration) of the DGHS.

He made the remarks at a time when the DGHS was conducting drives to shut down all unauthorised private healthcare facilities with a 96-hour ultimatum that ended yesterday. 

A total of 700 unauthorised private hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres, and blood banks were shut as of Wednesday.

While announcing the drive on Sunday, Prof Kabir said there were around 2,000 private healthcare facilities in operation whose applications for a new licence were still pending.

He said all those healthcare facilities would be shut down.

The number of closed-down facilities, however, was far from that figure.

Asked, Prof Kabir said, "It is tough to close all unauthorised facilities through such drives. But we are trying to do as much as possible."

The latest drive, meanwhile, had faced backlash from the first day, thanks to the shortage of logistics and human resources, health officials said.

The issue had also been discussed in a coordination meeting held on Tuesday with Prof Kabir in the chair.

Civil surgeons at the meeting mentioned they were failing to cover their areas due to the shortage of vehicles, fuel and human resources.

One of the civil surgeons said they had an allocation of 250 litres of fuel each week to run the vehicles, which is not sufficient to cover each area.

For Dhaka city, the DGHS formed seven teams to operate the drive.

On the first day of the drive, no team could start their drive before 12 noon due to the shortage of necessary transport, a health official told The Daily Star seeking anonymity.

About this, Prof Kabir said, "It is a fact that we have a shortage. But we cannot stop our task for this. We have to keep working parallelly."

Earlier, the DGHS conducted a nationwide drive against unregistered hospitals and clinics starting on May 26 and shut down 1,641 institutions across the country.

Since then, a total of 1,489 new private healthcare organisations were registered while 2,930 renewed their registration, health officials said.