Coronavirus: Bhagalpur’s hospital is improving authorities trying to tackle overinvestment in health.
Bhagalpur:
At the height of the first wave of COVID-19 in India last year, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital (JLNMCH) in Bhagalpur demonstrated an unfortunate medical situation in most rural areas.
Wards and ICUs were so packed with patients and relatives that armed escorts accompanied doctors in their rings, in case violence broke out. When a second wave hit India this year, doctors say, the government hospital, with some 800 beds and serving millions, was barely functioning.
But thanks to the misery brought on by the pandemic, JLNMCH is gaining a new life as authorities try to tackle chronic overinvestment in health, especially in Bhagalpur’s home state of Bihar where healthcare infrastructure is among the worst in the country.
The hospital has now set up its own oxygen generator to meet nearly all of their needs, hired dozens of new nurses, nearly doubled ICU capacity, and linked hundreds of beds to pipeline oxygen for the first time. first after many years. Its heavily peeling, pink exterior could also receive a fresh coat of paint, the hospital director said.
Construction of the splendid new 200-bed advanced care hospital, which began several years ago, has accelerated this year and is likely to be completed in the first half of next year.
“COVID has benefited us,” Asim Kumar Das, JLNMCH’s medical director, told Reuters in a hospital interview. “Although it has destroyed humanity and brought great suffering, it has brought us a lot of changes in the infrastructure of the hospital.”
Mr Das said the hospital was in talks with the state government to add 200 more beds in the main complex, along with additional human resources due to a “serious shortage” of doctors and medical staff.
Health infrastructure is starting to receive similar attention in many parts of India, government figures show.
Bhagalpur’s hospital has not admitted a single COVID-19 patient in the past two months.
Fund flow to oxygen
Heavily criticized for the record number of coronavirus infections and deaths in April and May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, along with states and government-run companies, provided the budget for hospitals so that all nearly 750 districts of India have at least one oxygen generating plant.
About 4,000 of them have been commissioned in recent months, according to the government.
The government has also pledged to build more new hospitals and upgrade existing ones over the next few years with an investment of around $9 billion – part of a larger plan to double the number of hospital beds to two. hospital beds per 1,000 people.
Many states are also planning to double their health spending, the federal government says.
India’s public health budget is among the lowest in the world, meaning its citizens’ out-of-pocket spending is among the highest, according to World Bank data.
‘A good start’
In the next year, Bihar has committed to complete the construction of 1,600 new government hospitals at a cost of nearly $500 million. As of 2018, the state has fewer than 80 major county and district hospitals.
“It’s a good start, there’s no doubt about that,” said cardiologist and epidemiologist K. Srinath Reddy, president of the nonprofit Public Health Foundation of India.
“But without human resources – they must be sufficient in number, well-trained and well distributed across the country – then infrastructure alone will not be able to cope. Therefore, this factor is needed. get focused as quickly as possible.”
Bhagalpur Hospital currently has 60 ICU beds, but during a recent Reuters visit, many of the rooms were locked or empty.
“We are short on human resources,” said the department’s doctor in charge, Mahesh Kumar, in one of the empty rooms, where 16 beds are lined with blue mattresses. “We need trained doctors and medical staff. If we had them, we could easily keep all the ICUs open.”
According to government data released in August, government-run district hospitals in Bihar have one of the worst doctor-to-patient ratios.
New Delhi has a headcount more than double the national average, well below federal government figures.
In a report presenting the data, the government identified a shortage of human resources as one of the main problems and said it was working to fix it.
Inaugurating nine medical colleges in the district’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh late last month, Prime Minister Modi said India will have more doctors in the next 10-12 years than it did in the first 70 years alone. separated from British rule in 1947.
The drop in the number of COVID-19 cases has taken India some time.
Bhagalpur’s JLNMCH has not admitted a single COVID-19 patient in the past two months, reflecting the low number of new cases in Bihar, where it is estimated that the majority of the population was naturally infected in July.
A building dedicated to receiving about 100 COVID-19 patients was completely empty, while in the pediatric ICU, 16 beds were kept empty in case another wave hits the children.
“Since the second wave, there has been an improvement in the infrastructure as well as the capacity of medical staff,” said Kumar Gaurav, a psychiatrist who ran the hospital in the previous two waves because most doctors Senior doctors have all contracted the virus or have been reluctant to take responsibility.
“If the third wave comes to fruition, or anything else, we’ll be able to handle it much better.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was automatically generated from the feed provided.)
