BENGALURU: Death audits done during the first Covid wave in Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, found that there were faulty non-invasive ventilators (NIV) and regular ventilators. The ventilators were donated by PM-CARES Fund.
The notes of the death audit conducted between October 5, 2020, and November 3, 2020, listed recommendations made in a meeting. One of them read, “Oxygen supply issues and issues regarding non-functioning Non-Invasive Ventilators and ventilators to be solved at the earliest.”
Notes of the discussion held for the death audit conducted for the dates August 19, 2020 and October 4, 2020, read, “Issues with the functioning of Agva ventilators.” “Two or three NIVs which the hospital purchased had problems, and we exchanged them for new ones. The Agva ventilators were donated by PM-CARES Fund, and 4-5 of them had issues.
We replaced those too. These problems did not affect patients because we would replace the machines with functional ones, as soon as we found out that they were not working,” a doctor from Bowring Hospital said. When the caseload was low, the hospital exchanged the machines with functional ones.
There have been reports of faulty ventilators sent to Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and other states by the Health ministry. Many of them have been lying unutilised. Apart from this, acute scarcity of beds during the second wave was also revealed in the minutes of the meeting, for the death audit conducted between May 16, 2021, and June 15, 2021.
A query was asked on the reason for non-availability of beds, especially ICU beds, at the right time. The response read, “A majority of patients were walk-in patients who were critical with low oxygen saturation and were managed in triage itself, due to non-availability of beds in various zones.”