The Health Department will provide additional outpatient services (OPs) at 50 places in the flood-affected panchayats and municipalities.
It includes 42 panchayats and eight municipalities. The district has requested for 50 additional doctors to oversee the OPs, said District Medical Officer N.K. Kuttappan. The Director, Medical Education, would deploy postgraduate students for the OPs.
The OPs will function for a month for disease surveillance in the affected areas. They will be set up in places away from the existing healthcare centre, in a library or a heath sub-centre or any other building that can be utilised to help people reach for medical help immediately. Doctors will reach out to people in mobile clinics too.
Palliative care nurses are already in the field conducting house visits on a schedule. The nurses have also been trained to find out the possibility of outbreak of diseases. They will also record counselling needs in houses they visit.
Public health volunteers will begin house visits from Thursday. The visits are to ensure that people are getting back to normal life after the floods and to find out the healthcare needs of the affected. The teams will provide cleaning chemicals and tools too.
As part of the disease surveillance, a mobile app that was designed to improve reporting from private hospitals is being used, said Additional District Medical Officer S. Sreedevi.