BHUBANESWAR: Are hospitals in Odisha facing a crisis of beds for Covid-19 patients with the private hospitals allegedly not adhering to the Health department’s directive of reserving 50 pc of their beds for such patients? The question is now haunting the State government as patients in the eight western Odisha districts and Khurda, Cuttack - the Covid hotspots - scrambled for beds despite its tall claims of making an arrangement of around 10,000 beds in dedicated Covid hospitals (DCHs) and private hospitals besides, 2,500 ICU beds and 800 ventilators.
The answer lies in the absence of a system to know the status of bed occupancy hospital-wise on a real time basis in Odisha. Also, the Covid beds have been set up in cluster mode.
Of the 10 western Odisha districts, eight have 21,179 active cases, nearly 45 per cent (pc) of total active cases of the State.
The districts have been divided into five clusters - Kalahandi, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Koraput, Balangir - with a general bed capacity of 2,500 and 700 ICU beds.
While the hospital beds and ICUs in four districts are fully occupied, the health officials claimed that around 50 per cent beds in the clusters are still vacant.
“The clusters have been created in view of health facilities and manpower availability. We have enough beds, but patients from one district are not willing to go to another district in the same cluster,” said Director of Public Health Dr Niranjan Mishra.
But how will patients know how many beds in which hospitals are lying vacant at a time when the government facilities are filling up fast and private hospitals have already started turning away patients citing dearth of beds? It is almost over a year into the pandemic and the State has failed to develop an online system on the availability of hospitals beds, ICUs and ventilators for Covid patients even as most of the traditional systems transitioned to online mode.
Last year several states including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and West Bengal and cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Nashik, Vadodara, Nagpur and Bhopla had developed online bed availability portal for the convenience of patients and prevent private hospitals from creating an unnatural crisis. However, such a system is not in place in Odisha.
The State had linked the complete Covid-19 healthcare infrastructure to GIS mapping to enable people to know about quarantine centres, Covid hospitals and testing facilities last year. This time, no such facility is available. The portal www.odishacovidgis.in is unresponsive now.
Health experts have demanded the government to come clean in terms of testing facilities, health infrastructure, especially for Covid-19, bed occupancy, oxygen and drugs availability through regular briefings to gain the confidence of people on the system.
Additional Professor of Indian Institute of Public Health Sarit Kumar Rout said an IT platform needs to be developed for a real time update of information on Covid management.
“Bed and ICU occupancy must be updated on a real time basis and the health officials should make surprise checks in private hospitals regularly and monitor the whole system,” he added.
Experts also demanded that beds should be created in district approach mode instead of cluster and the high caseload district must have at least 2,000 beds each with oxygen supply.