BENGALURU: Karnataka is one of the states which features in NITI Aayog’s report on best practices adopted for home-based management of Covid-19.The state government partnered with private entities, including Swasth, Portea and StepOne, to provide care to home-quarantined/isolated patients as well as connect them to facility care, if needed. The efforts included teleconsultation and triaging, training of health workers and providing ambulance services and medicines.
“The state government ensured that health teams from the district health authority, BBMP, authorised private institutions and agencies visited the patient’s home to ensure they were isolated. Alternatively, an empanelled agency handled telephonic medical triage by confirming the person was isolating. A dedicated tele-monitoring link was established for the patient’s daily follow-up during the entire period of home isolation,” NITI Aayog stated.
In the first wave of the pandemic, the health department, with help of Swasth, provided teleconsultation to home-isolated Covid-19 patients.A total of 5,204 patients were monitored by the NGO (July to September 2020). Subsequently, from October 2020, the health department partnered with Portea to provide home care, including attendant support, to Covid-19 patients. Teleconsultation was made available to home-isolated cases via StepOne and Portea Medical. For medical and non-medical emergencies, patients were given an escalation number.
To manage and distribute medical oxygen efficiently and transparently at all levels, the government, in May 2021, decided to set up an oxygen cell in each district, which would function 24x7. The cell coordinated with hospitals and met their demand if there was any shortage. As of May 2021, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) trained over 7,000 final-year MBBS students to treat and monitor home-isolated cases.
The report admitted that due to lack of awareness about Covid-19 Care Centres (CCC), only 30 per cent of the 19,300 beds were occupied in 289 newly set-up CCCs in 227 taluks in May. Of the 3,218 CCC beds in Bengaluru, 90 per cent were vacant in May 2021.