Amidst rising complaints about delays or non-availability of admission for COVID 19 positive patients, the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has come out with a comprehensive decentralised hospital bed management and allotment policy to ensure smooth handling of such patients at ward level. Assistant Commissioner in charge of every ward will activate the central control room and ensure thatthe Disaster Control Room (DCR) at the ward level is also used for decentralised bed management, allotment, and redressal of COVID 19 grievances.
Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Chahal in his order issued on Friday said that these DCR at ward level will now be known as ‘’Ward War Room.’’ (WWR). The policy will come into effect from June 8 and it will continue till further orders. Each Disaster Control Room will have 30 telephone lines in the backend of WWR telephone numbers. The Assistant Commissioner in charge of the ward will ensure the uninterrupted functioning of these telephone lines. The WWR will be manned 24x7 by doctors and school teaching staff.TheWWR activity will be supervised by a senior resident doctor and all doctors including resident doctors will be provided by Director, Medical Education and Research.
BMC’s policy comes close on the heels when hospital bed capacity for COVID 19 patients has increased to 9,000 from 3,500 in one and a half months. Additional 8,500 plus beds are being made available through jumbo facilities, of which 2,500 beds are already made ready and have started accepting patients. About 900 more ICUs plus ventilators, and ICUs are also getting added. It will be WWR’s responsibility for allotment of general beds, oxygenated beds, ICU beds and ICU with ventilator beds to the deserving patients. Chahal has warned that laxity or mismanagement at any level will not be tolerated and automatically lead to strictfixationof personal accountabilities followed by exemplary penal action. Every morning, the Epidemic Cell will segregate the list of positive cases received from the laboratory into ward-wise distribution and immediately inform the assistant commissioner through WWR daily at 8 am online.
Thereafter, the WWR will immediately activate their machinery and approach the COVID 19 positive patients through is a team of doctors in ‘’polite and reassuring manner.’’ ‘’If the patient is asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, the doctor at WWR in consultation with Medical Officer of Health (MOH) shall advise the patient for home isolation or institutional isolation depending upon the type of accommodation where this patent presently is residing (building, chawl, slum),’’ the policy said.
However, if the patient if moderately symptomatic and required to be admitted in dedicated COVID health centre (DCHC) as per the oxygen saturation and temperature reading, the doctor at WWR will refer the patient to the nursing home/hospitals identified locally at the ward level and also to the Jumbo facilities where DCGC has been started.
If the patient is highly symptomatic, the WWR doctor will assign the requisite oxygenated/ICU beds to such patients. The WWR will organise an ambulance, transfer the patient to the assigned hospital with due intimation to the assigned hospital
