BENGALURU: The Department of Health and Family Welfare on Sunday convened a meeting of its top officers to formulate protocols for the allocation of human resources in the event of a larger COVID outbreak. The meeting was led by Dr PC Jaffer, Secretary, Finance Department (Expenditure) and Nodal Officer, Capacity Building, under the guidance of Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Commissioner, Department of Health and Family Welfare. Officials outlined the roles and responsibilities of personnel required for smooth functioning of health facilities, from fever clinics to intensive care units at COVID hospitals.
The team also mapped a detailed set of activities to ensure continuous care for patients, from reception at health facilities to different stages of testing and referrals to tertiary facilities. “The government has been fairly successful in containing an unprecedented spread of COVID-19 in the state, but we are not taking things lightly.
We are preparing for any eventuality to prevent inconvenience to the people. We have visualised hospital conditions under different stages of the pandemic, and broken down essential activities – including non-clinical ones such as crowd management, food management, mobility and data entry -- into different buckets that allows us to assign specific roles to medical and non-medical staff for better efficiency,” said Pandey.
“The government is also planning to enlist volunteers to support facility functions and develop training modules to enable them to carry out these functions. The protocols also make provisions for tying up with community management teams to handle follow-ups,” he said. Also, the department is in the process of identifying various roles that can be entrusted to volunteers with minimum training or intense specialised training. Once finalised, the protocols will be forwarded to districts.