BENGALURU: A three-member team of IAS and IFS officers, appointed by BBMP Chief Commissioner Gaurav Gupta on May 3 in the wake of the bed-blocking scam, has come out with a 33-point recommendation for streamlining the bed allocation and patient-shifting process.
The team recommended that in case of non-availability of beds at the time of allocation, a wait list of patients for a particular type of bed should be created in the system. The approval of the patient should be taken before putting him/her in the wait list. The civic body’s public portal should display the wait list under the four categories of beds zone-wise. On allocation of a bed, the patient should be intimated through a system-generated SMS and an Interactive Voice Response System.
To improve transparency in allocation, there should be a system to accept requests for bed blocking from a patient. A public-friendly dashboard should be created on the BBMP website to display bed management related reports, which should include the number of beds available, blocked, unblocked, admissions and discharges and wait list every day for each bed type, for all hospitals. The reports may be near real-time or updated every two hours or so.
“Tele-verification of patients once in two days by a dedicated 1912 call-out facility should be done so that we can ensure that the patients whose names appear in the Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust (SAST) portal only are allocated beds in government category, and cross checking of discharge date takes place,” they advised.In future, action can be taken to develop a single application for pandemic management to replace multiple applications being used now, starting from the API integration with ICMR till the discharge of the patient.