Nagpur: The Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) will begin training of medical officers followed by vaccinators for execution of Covid-19 vaccination programme from Wednesday. The number of health care workers registered for phase-I vaccination has also increased to 19,000.
Municipal commissioner Radhakrishnan B, additional municipal commissioner Ram Joshi and additional chief medical officer Dr Praveen Gantawar have organized training for 80 medical officers at Town Hall in Mahal, from 10am to 4pm. Surveillance medical officer from World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Mohammed Sajid will impart training to the medical officers. After this, medical officers will train nursing staff, who will be appointed as vaccinators.
As reported by TOI on December 16, the civic body had fixed a target to administer vaccine to around 20,000 heathcare workers from government and private hospitals under phase-I. As per tentative plan, 50 vaccination centres will be developed for the purpose. Each centre will have four vaccination officers and one vaccinator.
An NMC official told TOI, “Medical officers will be trained as per the guidelines issued by the ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW) for developing the centre, which will be equipped with all necessary facilities.” “Each centre will have a waiting room where beneficiary’s registration ID, identity proof and schedule will be verified. Temperature and symptoms of the beneficiary will also be checked. Vaccine will be administered in a separate room earmarked for the purpose. The beneficiary will be asked to wait in observation room for 30 minutes where again temperature followed by blood pressure etc will be checked,” he said.
The official added the NMC has registered health care workers on MoHFW portal. “Government will make available CoWIN in which details like name, age, contact number and address of the beneficiaries will be uploaded. After this step, the beneficiary will get a message informing date, time and venue of the vaccination. The beneficiary will also get a post-vaccination message and another one informing about the second round of vaccination, which is yet to be cleared by the MoHFW,” he said.
The civic chief on December 15 had directed assistant commissioners and zonal medical officers to identify centres and submit list within a week. However, the list is yet to be submitted.
NMC sources told TOI, “The decision as to where to set up vaccination centres is yet to be taken. Initially, it was decided that NMC’s urban primary health centres (UPHCs) will be converted into vaccination centres. However, it was observed that the UPHCs do not meet the requirements. Now, whether to use community halls or schools, government, private hospitals for developing the centres is being discussed,” said sources.
Till last week, around 15,000 health care workers were registered for the vaccine. Only 209 of 650 private hospitals had submitted the list of health care workers despite the deadline lapsed on October 28. After prodded by A team led by Dr Gantawar, the number has increased to 19,000. The number of private hospitals submitting the list has also gone up to 320.
NMC sources said the number is likely to cross 20,000. The NMC is, however, yet to receive guidelines for vaccine storage. NMC officials are identifying storage facilities having arrangement for maintaining temperature ranging from 2 to 8 degree Celsius.
The NMC has also not received any guidelines whether the beneficiaries will have to get done RT-PCR or antibodies tests before taking the vaccine.