HYDERABAD : As the number of Corona virus cases increases in the country, several NGOs, and international organisations are coming forward to deal with the challenges of Covid- 19. The Centre has set up the Disaster Management Act, 2005 to coordinate with the private sector and NGOs for COVID-19 response-related activities. The services ask the NGOs to provide assistance for arranging more PPEs, provision of quarantine facilities, setting up community kitchens, creating awareness in different groups and communities etc. Now citybased health NGOs such as Access Foundation, Helping Hand Foundation, Al Khair Foundation and Help Hyderabad, have come up with a plan to procure and distribute PPEs to doctors in state run hospitals.
The NGOs ran a crowd-funded campaign under the banner #thankQdoc in the two weeks to mobilise funds to procure about 500 PPEs. So far, Access Foundation and the NGO Help Hyderabad have donated 75 PPEs, 150 N-95 Mask, 100 sanitisers, 1,800 gloves and 300 triple layer maskworth `2.5 lakh to Gandhi Hospital. Says Dr Mujtaba Hasan Askari of Helping Hand Foundation, “For the past one week we’ve doing the campaign #thankQdoc on social media. There are a bunch of vendors whom we contacted for PPEs who are themselves manufacturers.
The supply is in shortage. There’s a demand supply-demand gap. It’ll take time to bridge the gap. The PPEs are to be discarded after threefour hours. Getting the stock is difficult. The procurement takes a couple of days,” Other than that a set of 100 PPEs was handed over to the Superintendent, OGH by Al Khair Foundation comprising full hazmat suits, goggles, mask and gloves worth `2 lakh. The Helping Hand Foundation is also providing supplementary food packets containing citrus fruits, dates high on iron and proteins,biscuits and water