Kolkata: Private hospitals lower jab count to sustain drive

KOLKATA: Low on vaccine stock, many private hospitals in the city have decided to stay away from off-site vaccine camps for the time being and focus on vaccination at their hospital centres.
After the government framed fresh SOP to stop fraud, private hospitals are required to take permission from the local police and the health or municipality authorities to hold off-site camps. Also, site inspections have become a must. Given so many permissions, the private facilities have already cut down on off-site camps by half this week.

Fortis Hospital, which had been conducting off-site camps extensively, have now restricted itself to the drive on its hospital premises for about a week now. The hospital is now left with so few vials that they can now administer around 200 doses a day where from its two hospital centres, one at Anandapur and the other on Sarat Bose Road. They were inoculating about 800 doses a day. “We are left with only a few vials, as a result of which we are restricting the number of doses. We are expecting 50,000 doses of Covishield by the weekend or early next week. We have also received the confirmation for 20,000 Covaxin doses. Once we get the next consignment, we will scale up our drive again,” said Richa Singh Debgupta, chief of strategy and operations at Fortis Healthcare.
Charnock Hospital has run out of its Covishield stock and has only about 500 doses of Covaxin. “Given the kind of stock that we have now, we cannot go beyond 100 doses of Covaxin a day at our hospital centre. We can plan to escalate the drive only when we get our supply for June which is still due. We have also requisitioned another consignment of 18,000 doses,” said Ipsita Kundu, CEO, Charnock Hospitals.
At Medica, the number of inoculation has been reduced to almost half of what it was being done earlier. “We have enough stock and want to fan out in districts. But after the new SOP was formed, according to which approvals are required from local police and local health or municipal officials for off-site camps, the drive in districts will slow down. We are forced to inoculate about half the number of people we were vaccinating earlier,” said Medica Hospital Group chairman Alok Roy.
RN Tagore Hospital is expecting to get 9,500 Covishield doses, for which payment has been made. Since the hospital is not conducting any off-site camp now, the stock it has is likely to last about 12 days. “Initially, we had procured a sizeable stock. We now expect 9,500 Covishield and 2,500 Covaxin doses soon. We should be able to start more off-site camps by next week after getting clearance from health officials. Till then, we are stuck at 1,000 doses a day at the hospital,” said Narayan Health regional head (east) R Venkatesh.
“We plan to add three more vaccination sites in the hospital. Since we started late, we still have doses to expand the drive,” said Peerless CEO Sudipta Mitra.