Hiring med students to battle Covid

Hiring med students to battle Covid

These students will be tele-counselling and making data entries, but may also be roped in for hospital duty on a Rs 40,000 monthly stipend.

In a move aimed at reducing the pressure on the overburdened medical fraternity, the Chennai Corporation has recruited a group of final-year MBBS students as trainee medical officers for Covid duty in Tamil Nadu. This comes a fortnight after the Centre’s review meeting that decided to incentivise final-year medical and nursing students to help out.

These students will be tele-counselling and making data entries, but may also be roped in for hospital duty on a Rs 40,000 monthly stipend. They will have to make calls to home quarantined patients to enquire about their SPO2 levels, comorbidities, etc., ensure food distribution and garbage collection in their houses, and coordinate with hospital facilities for more serious cases. Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi have already taken this step. Gujarat was the first, having made it compulsory in July last year for final years to report for pandemic duty on a stipend of Rs 500 per day. It threatened to debar them from examinations and invoked Section 188 of the IPC and the Disaster Management Act, 2005, if they did not report for work. A group of students had even moved court, citing exposure to the disease, but it was turned down, stating the medical profession warrants students “to step in for service during such critical times”. Internationally, too, the US and UK have roped in final-year students into the healthcare system. Italy deployed more than 10,000 students to general practitioner clinics and senior citizens’ institutes to help experienced doctors focus on hospital duty. But this has opened up a debate on whether it is right to get students into this risky duty. Questions have been raised about whether they would be provided with insurance cover. The Maharashtra government is the first to announce a Rs 50 lakh insurance cover, apart from the Rs 30,000 remuneration and free accommodation for them.

According to ethics in the medical profession, primum non nocere (“do no harm” in Latin) means a doctor has to be careful about not taking any step that may worsen the patient’s condition. The TN government must keep that in mind while tweaking its policy to induct students into the Covid fray.

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