NEW DELHI: Amid reports that doctors in many states are not getting paid salaries in time, the Centre on Thursday warned states that hospitals and institutions not releasing salaries of healthcare workers engaged in COVID-19 duty timely could get penalised under the Disaster Management Act.
The direction to the states comes following an order by the Supreme Court.
In a letter written to all the state chief secretaries, Union health secretary Preeti Sudan said that “states and UTs should ensure that salaries of doctors and health workers doing COVID-19 duty shall be released on time.”
“The chief secretary of the state/ UT should ensure compliance of this order by all concerned, violation of which will be treated as an offence under the DM Act read with the Indian Penal Code and action is taken accordingly against defaulting hospitals/ institutions/ authorities,” the letter also said.
The letter was also sent to directors and medical superintendents of all central hospitals.
Union health minister Harsh Vardhan meanwhile launched the country's first mobile lab for COVID-19 testing in an attempt to promote last-mile testing access in rural India.
The Infectious Disease Diag Lab (I-Lab) – Rapid Response Mobile Laboratory has been developed with the support from the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology and Andhra Pradesh Med-tech Zone (AMTZ) under DBT-AMTZ COMManD (COVID Medtech Manufacturing Development) Consortia.
The main goal of the mobile lab is to address the shortage of critical healthcare technologies in India and move progressively towards a stage of self-sufficiency.
Developed in partnership with Transasia – a diagnostic firm, Scient Infra and Kalyani Cleantech, the I-lab has Bio-Safety Level-2 facility and it was built in straight eight days at a cost of around Rs 1 crore, said an official statement.
I-Lab is capable of conducting both COVID-19 and some non-COVID tests such as tests for tuberculosis and can give results the same day.
For Coronavirus, it can carry out RT-PCR as well as ELISA based antibody tests.
While RT-PCR test is a Covid-19 diagnosis test, ELISA test looks for antibodies developed by an individual against the virus used to assess whether someone has been exposed to the pathogen in the recent past. I-lab can run 50 RT-PCR and 200 ELISA tests in a day.