Daunting task for small Telangana hospitals as cases surge

HYDERABAD: The mismatch between requirement and availability of beds for Covid-19 patients in both government and private hospitals has thrown up several challenges.
Though the state government has told Telangana high court that it would come up with a digital solution for better coordination, lack of a dashboard on bed availability in government and private hospitals is making matters worse for both the patients and their families.Experts said though big corporate hospitals may have sufficient number of beds and are ready to serve Covid-19 patients, there is a greater need to encourage smaller hospitals to serve patients. “But, lack of trained staff in smaller hospitals to handle emergencies like Covid-19 or breathlessness can be a big handicap,” they explained.
Experts in the field said it is high time the government appointed a nodal officer to take up this role so that worries of hospitals would be minimised to a large extent. “Many patients do not even know that the nodal Covid hospital — Gandhi Hospital — does not accept mild and symptomatic patients and that it admits only critical patients or those who need ventilator support,” an expert said.
Surprisingly, despite so much noise being made by the medical fraternity and the court, the government has no correct data on the bed strength in private hospitals, sources said.