PUNE: State technical committee head Subhash Salunke, in a move to control Covid deaths, has directed private hospitals in the city to appoint committees to audit all deaths and submit detailed weekly reports to the local administration.
Salunke on Friday told TOI that the analyses of patient deaths will help authorities prevent mortality in the region.
“We are starting with hospitals within Pune Municipal Corporation limits. Facilities in PCMC limits and rural parts will follow soon. The same process will also be replicated across the division,” he said.
The expert added that the death reports will help determine if patient deaths were the result of delayed admissions or problematic treatment protocols.
Pune city has so far registered 7,600 Covid-19 deaths. According to the new orders, hospitals will also have to submit historical data on deaths that have already occurred.
The guidelines are a response to the region’s high case fatality rate (CFR). In Pune, the CFR is nearly 2.4% compared to the state’s 2.6% and the country’s average of 1.5%. September saw the most deaths during the pandemic. State task force member Shashank Joshi said, “We want to bring the CFR to below 1%. Efforts are also being made to ensure cases are detected early.”
Maharashtra has already deployed health workers to go door-to-door for the ‘My Family, My Responsibility’ survey, which aims to find people with symptoms. State health minister Rajesh Tope has also called for the implementation of the teleICU initiative that connects doctors in rural parts with experts from large hospitals. The CFR is an important indicator of a disease’s impact on a population.
According to the World Health Organisation, there are two measures used to assess the proportion of infected individuals with fatal outcomes.
The first method is the infection fatality ratio, or IFR, which estimates this proportion of deaths among all infected individuals in a population.
The second is case fatality ratio (CFR), which estimates this proportion of deaths among only identified confirmed cases.
India continues to have wide variations in the Covid-19 CFR. The state of Punjab has the country’s highest CFR at 3.14%. Gujarat’s has dropped to 2.2% while Kerala — the state with the third-highest burden of active cases — has registered a low CFR of 0.3%.