Hyderabad: Calls grow to convert public spaces to hospitals

HYDERABAD: An acute shortage of Covid-19 beds across city hospitals, including government run tertiary centres like Gandhi Hospital, Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences (TIMS) and King Koti Hospital has left patients in utter despair, with many succumbing while looking for a bed. Given the magnitude of the crisis, doctors and common residents are now urging the authorities to convert other public spaces into makeshift medical facilities for the ill.
On an average, private hospitals say they have been turning away at least 30 to 40 patients every day from their emergency department, unable to get them a bed. The situation across the three government hospitals is much the same. About 30 to 60 patients are regularly sent away from there too.
TIMS, for instance, was nearly full on Saturday and struggling to accommodate new patients. “We have just about one or two oxygen beds available as there will be some discharges. But it’s a dynamic situation. We are almost full,” said the hospital superintendent, Dr Ehsan Ahmed Khan. At Gandhi Hospital too officials were fighting the same battle. “We do not have a single vacant ICU or ventilator bed out of the 600 beds. Even the oxygen beds are running at full capacity. We are somehow managing as there are 50 to 60 discharges every day and around 20 deaths too,” said the hospital superintendent Dr M Raja Rao.
With the wards chock-oblock and ambulances carrying critical patients lined up outside this nodal Covid hospital on many days, experts feel that this is the right time for the government to take over certain public sector facilities and turn them them into temporary Covid care centres and hospitals. “As a future step, to mitigate the crisis of shortage of beds, we can even think of setting up beds in stadiums, hotels, resorts, hostels and educational institutes,” said professor Subodh Kandamuthan, director, Centre for Healthcare Management, ASCI. He added: “Not just Hyderabad, it is also important to add beds in districts too. Government should think of collaborating with DRDO, HAL and army facilities where they can set up beds.”
At present, the shortage of beds is leading to patients succumbing to the virus, while looking for a bed, say doctors.