BENGALURU: Patients, irrespective of Covid-19 status, are having a tough time finding a ventilator bed in the city, but it’s not due to shortage of ventilators, say experts. It’s lack of equitable access and distribution of resources. “Large corporate hospitals have several ventilator beds but these are expensive and out of reach of common people. The issue is accessibility and affordability. Smaller private hospitals and government hospitals, which are affordable, see a large numbers of patients and thus, do not have enough ventilator beds readily available,” said Dr Sanjiv Lewin, chief of Medical Services, St John’s Medical College Hospital.
For instance, currently at St John’s, all ICU ventilator beds are full — 40 by non-Covid patients and 53 by Covid patients. In the past eight months, they have tried multiple times to shift patients to the government-run Victoria and Bowring hospitals, but their ventilator beds were always full. It’s not just requirement of the machine itself, a trained critical care team including nursing, oxygen, support like IV fluid, dialysis, medication for heart and BP support, high-end antibiotics for bacterial infection, special medication to counteract inflammation etc are needed.
“The manpower requirement for a Covid ICU patient is three times higher because special strategies are used to ventilate,” Dr Lewin added.While large corporate hospitals in Bengaluru have 50-200 ICU ventilator beds, Ace Suhas Hospital has 10-12 ICU beds, of which 4 or 5 have ventilators, said Dr Jagadish Hiremath, CEO of Ace Suhas Hospital. Drawing a comparison, Dr Hiremath said, “Corporate hospitals have more equipment but are tough to access for the lower and middle class, unless a Covid patient is referred through government quota. The cost goes up to Rs 1 lakh-1.5 lakh per day in a large private hospital for ICU ventilator bed, as opposed to ours which cost Rs 20,000-Rs 25,000.”
Owing to unequal patient load this situation creates, smaller or government hospitals are forced to turn critical patients away. Dr Sylvia Karpagam, public health doctor said, “Smaller set-ups and government hospitals are not able to meet standards owing to poor policy decisions. The government should have invested in ventilators for smaller private and government hospitals, ICU trained staff and oxygen. Price caps are not followed and the government is unable to regulate them.”