Private hospitals issued an order to reserve 50% of its beds for Covid patients

Ranchi: On Monday, the state health department has ordered all the private hospitals to reserve 50% of its beds for Covid patients. In the previous week, the government had made it mandatory for the private hospitals to reserve 25% of its beds for Covid-19 patients. With the massive outbreak of the deadly virus, the figure has now been almost double. According to the officials, Delhi has also supplied 1,500 doses of Remdesivir injections to Jharkhand.

Such a decision came into being after a meeting of the senior health officials chaired by Banna Gupta, the state health minister at the Nepal House was held on Monday.

Banna while reporting to TOI stated, “I held consultations with senior health officials, and we decided that 50% of total beds across all private hospitals need to be reserved for Covid-19 patients”.

The state health secretary, K K Soan, issued a letter and ordered all the deputy commissioners to make sure that the private hospitals follow the 50% reservation norm.

Soan’s letter further stated, “In order to ensure timely availability of beds to infected patients, 50% of total beds at private hospitals need to be reserved for Covid-19 patients”.

Officials opined that they are looking for options where they can increase the number of beds by building makeshift hospitals across the districts with higher caseload. They are also thinking of converting the Skill India’s residential complexes into Covid care centres (CCC).

Banna exclaimed, “I have asked the health secretary to review the condition of residential complexes run by Skill India across the state and decide whether they can be converted to Covid treatment centres to increase bed capacity”.

The state drug controller, Dr Ritu Sahay, in relation to the new stocks of Remdesivir that Jharkhand has received, stated that the CCCs shall receive the life-saving medicine under strict surveillance of drug inspectors to stop black marketing as it is very crucial in the treatment of Covid-19 patients