The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave the Centre a day to issue an order to ensure that the States pay their doctors and healthcare workers full salaries, provide them with appropriate accommodation and implement quarantine guidelines uniformly among medical staffers and doctors regardless of the nature of their exposure to COVID-19 patients.
A Bench led by Justice Ashok Bhushan took exception to how quarantine had been done away for all medical workers, except for those in the high-risk category. “Have you done away with quarantine? Doctors are only quarantined if they are in high-risk exposure,” Justice Bhushan asked the government, represented by Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta.
Any medical worker, whether in personal protective equipment or not, who came into contact with a COVID-19 patient should be quarantined for a week initially, the court said.
Senior advocate K.V. Vishwanathan, for petitioner Dr. Arushi Jain, said that in most cases, medical staffers had their aged parents staying with them. Lack of separate and appropriate accommodation for healthcare workers meant many of them went back home and exposed senior citizens to the danger of contracting the virus. Mr. Vishwanathan said many States were not paying healthcare workers on time.
Mr. Mehta acknowledged that there had been some “aberration” in the provision of alternative accommodation to medical staffers.
Mr. Vishwanathan referred to the Centre’s affidavit which said public health was a State subject. Hence, the court should hold the States accountable for payment of salaries of healthcare workers and finding them suitable accommodation. However, the Bench did not agree with his suggestion to issue a directive to the States; instead, it asked the Centre to issue the order by June 18.
Ms. Jain has questioned the Centre’s new Standard Operating Procedure, issued on May 15, which ended the 14-day mandatory quarantine for healthcare workers.