BENGALURU: Medical Education Minister Dr K Sudhakar on Friday directed officials to utilise the services of final-year medical students to fight Covid-19, as the government is facing a shortage of staff to achieve its testing targets. Along with direct recruitment, the final-year students of lab technician courses, science students of RGUHS and volunteers will be given proper training before assigning Covid duties, he said during a discussion with officials through video-conferencing.
The government is facing an uphill task as it has set a steep target of collecting 30,000 samples per day in Bengaluru alone, but faces a crippling shortage of staff. Already, staff from around 80 private labs in Bengaluru are being used for the task. If the response to direct recruitment is poor, newspaper advertisements can be given by increasing emoluments, the minister said.There have been issues in sharing information collected from the door-to-door survey real time, and a decision has been taken to allow zone-wise dashboards to share war room data. He instructed officials to recruit data entry operators from Keonics.
The city has over 12,000 containment zones, and there is a need to quickly trace ILI and SARI cases and pass on the information to zonal officials. It is also the duty of zonal teams to provide ambulances wherever necessary, he said, and directed officials to recruit necessary staff to these teams too. There is a need to spread awareness on people infected, under quarantine and treatment, he said and asked public representatives to be proactive. Senior officers Shalini Rajaneesh, Ajay Seth, Manjunath Prasad, Munish Moudgil, Satyavathi, D. Randeep, Anbu Kumar, Dr Manjula and others were present during the video-conference.