BENGALURU: Bengaluru’s largest government clinical facility, Victoria Hospital, will start non-covid services from Monday, over 10 months after they were closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic. Dr C R Jayanti, Dean of Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute (BMCRI), to which Victoria Hospital is affiliated, said, “We have been preparing to open non-Covid services for the past two months, but we had to ensure that the hospital is prepared to restart them.
The safety of every patient is important to us. We will restart the services from Monday.” It can be noted that recently, resident doctors had protested against the closure of tertiary care services for non-Covid patients at the hospital. The services were shut on March 26 as the hospital was designated as a Covid-19 facility. Covid patient numbers began to fall during the last two months but the hospital was still not seeing any non-Covid patients 10 months after regular services were shut.
This had irked many patients and resident doctors too. Victoria Hospital is one of the major tertiary care hospitals in the city and caters to patients from all over the State. With services being closed, nearly 11 lakh patients were hit. Each day, the hospital sees nearly 2,000 outpatient cases and about 100 surgeries.
Dr Jayanthi said that the surgeries and other departments will also open on Monday.
“We were preparing for a possible second wave, but at the same time, we will also ensure that non-Covid services are not hit. We have set up everything towards this end, and fumigated and disinfected the hospital and operation theatres. The culture sample reports have also come negative. So we will go ahead with surgeries too,” she said.
Meanwhile, PG students who have been missing out on practical classes are relieved that non-Covid services will resume. However, they are also worried about safety measures and preparedness of the hospital for a possible second wave of Covid -19 infections. “We are the worst-hit students in the entire country, I must say. We are also at risk of qualifying with inadequate skills if we further delay resuming non-Covid services.
Though we have been told that the services will start from Monday, we don’t see any arrangements made for our safety,” said a student from the Resident Doctors’ Association, on condition of anonymity. The resident doctor was apprehensive about whether or not patient interview tables would be readied with glass separators, proper screening of patients etc.