Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday has issued guidelines for discharge of patients from the COVID dialysis unit to native units and for resuming duty by dialysis healthcare workers with coronavirus infection. The hospital admission policy for COVID-19 patients will be similar to that decided for non-dialysis patients in the general population.
According to BMC, all COVID-19 positive dialysis patients taking dialysis in such centres should undergo a RT-PCR (real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) test on day 8 after the first positive report sampling date. They will take the next dialysis in their parent unit if the test result is negative.
However, if the test result is positive they will continue to do dialysis in the COVID-19 positive centre till day 14. ‘’Irrespective of the result of the COVID-19 RT-PCR done on day 8, they should return to their parent dialysis unit for dialysis on day 14, if they test negative on day 14,’’ said BMC in its guidelines.
Parent unit will dialyse these patients in the last shift for 14 days and then sanitize the dialysis centre with 1 per cent hypochlorite surface cleaning.
‘’No patient can be denied dialysis. If a slot is not available in the last shift the patient should be dialyzed in whichever slot is available in the parent unit,’’ said BMC.
Furthermore, BMC said if COVID-19 positive dialysis health care workers are asymptomatic they should return to work on day 10 from when they became symptomatic or day 10 from the positive COVID-19 RT-PCR whichever is earlier.
