Ask us for Remdesivir, don’t harass patients’ kin: Chief medical officer

GHAZIABAD: The health department has asked private Covid hospitals to not ask attendants of patients to arrange for Remdesivir injections, instead write to it to procure the drug. Health officials said that they have a quota of 199 doses per day for government hospitals, besides a separate allocation for private hospitals and that is enough to deal with critical patients daily.
Officiating chief medical officer Dr Sunil Tyagi said, “The health department has sufficient amounts of Remdesivir injections. We have asked hospitals to not allocate six doses to a patient at one go while denying injections to other patients. Instead, they should give injections to every patient and then seek the next dose from us the next day. The existing practice was causing scarcity of the vaccine.”
Tyagi added that hospitals will have to provide details of patients, who are being administered Remdesivir, including names and phone numbers so that it could be verified by health teams.
Hospitals are often prescribing injections and asking patients to get it. The CMO said that making arrangements for Remdesivir is the responsibility of the hospital and they cannot avoid it by writing a prescription. If the administration receives any complaint that patients are getting injections at a higher price from the market, action will be taken against the hospital, the CMO said.