By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem
Yes you may say “Oh no, this is just another article about Covid-19!” But I would like to say, No, this is not just another article about what you should do to keep yourself safe from picking up the Covid-19 infection. It is also not about what is going wrong across the country in managing Covid-19. But this is an article about what your doctors are doing, right here, in your own city, to keep you safe and get you back on your own two feet and send you home walking if not running from the hospital if you do happen to catch Covid-19 with your carelessness!
Yes, the invisible virus is driving us nuts and turning our lives and our whole world topsy-turvy but we have to beat it even if it seems like an impossible task. And, amid all the agencies that are helping you to do it, which are now called ‘The Covid Warriors’ are your medical teams. We are reading and seeing painful reports of seriously ill Covid patients, including some doctors who own hospitals, not being able to find ICU beds in most cities. Desperate Governments, driven to the wall, are asking Private Hospital Managements in almost all States, to reserve fifty percent of their beds exclusively to treat Covid cases.
Looking at the helplessness of the situation this certainly seems like the right thing to do but there is a catch here. And it’s a very big catch and it concerns your own safety! If Covid patients are treated in General Hospitals, Government or Private, they can pose a huge risk to all the other patients who go there for treatment and their attendants too who accompany them. So given a choice no one would even like to go near any establishment that deals with Covid cases and this fear psychosis is justified too.
With the virus being most notorious for its infectivity, nothing can be more dangerous or more effective than mixed medical establishments in spreading it far and wide across the countryside even as we are combating it on all fronts.
To prevent this catastrophe from happening and to still comply with Government directives and provide care to all categories of Covid patients, MAHAN (Mysuru Association of Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Clinics and Diagnostic Centres) has come up with a very novel and certainly noble initiative to manage them without giving room for any hazard to non-Covid patients or their attendants.
Losing no time to weigh the pros and cons and the ifs and buts, we at MAHAN immediately swung into action and declared in one voice that we would pool our resources and manpower (Woman Power, included, mind you!) and establish and manage not only separate high-end hospitals but also comfortable quarantine centres for non-symptomatic Covid positive cases and monitoring and treating centres for mildly symptomatic cases across the length and breadth of our city.
A few MAHAN members with very large hospitals like the JSS and the Apollo Group went a step further and have already established their own individual Covid Care facilities which is again a very bold and laudable move. But most medium, mid-sized and small member hospitals are now involved in what has come to be called the Mahan Covid Care Consortium. As a first step, the District Administration has offered us the 100-bedded Vikram Jeshta Hospital in Yadavagiri to be run by us as a high-end Covid Care Centre to manage the battle casualties among Covid Warriors.
Yes, despite all the high-tech precautions that these heroes take while going about their work, we are finding more and more doctors, para medical staff, Police and civic service personnel getting infected, often with very distressing results.
MAHAN is also in the process of establishing another 40-bedded Covid care Centre at Gautam Hospital in Srirampura which will be open to the public very soon. Patients will be treated there upon payment of the Government prescribed treatment charges. Yes, even for all the private hospitals, wherever they are, the treatment charges are fixed and closely monitored by the Government with a fool-proof grievance redressal system in place. This should put an end to complaints from the public about any incidents, real or imagined, of overcharging and exploitation by Private Hospitals.
In addition to this, MAHAN in league with the Hotel Owners’Association of Mysuru is establishing very comfortable boarding and lodging facilities with very reasonable rates, to accommodate at least 2,000 Covid positive cases who may be non-symptomatic or only mildly symptomatic without the need for hospitalisation. With these developments, I’m sure that you will all agree with me that the silver lining edging the dark clouds of despair that are hovering over us, will certainly begin to look much brighter. But that’s not all.
More and more member hospitals are likely to join the Covid Consortium bandwagon and so we are more than likely to augment our facilities and services to not only effectively meet the crises head-on but to contain it too. It requires deputing a great chunk of our existing staff from our own hospitals to our Covid Care Centres, inconveniencing ourselves in the process and also recruiting additional hands and paying them all greatly augmented salaries to reward them adequately for their dedication, courage and commitment to serve the society.
It is certainly a humongous task but our unity and our coherent, coordinated and selfless efforts will pay us all very rich dividends in terms of soul satisfaction and sound sleep on the pillow of a clear conscience!
Heroes too are ordinary people who dream big and wake up inspired, to chase their dreams! While talking of inspiration, an almost unknown hero comes to my mind. I came to know about this little fellow from one of my patients who happened to get well after being admitted to the Government-run Covid Care Centre at the District Hospital on KRS Road. He is an orphan child who has studied up to II PUC class. He became a victim of the Covid virus and was admitted to the above facility where he thankfully made a complete and uneventful recovery.
To thank providence for it and to repay his debt to society, armed with the knowledge that he was immune to the infection at least for the present, he has decided to serve Covid afflicted patients. Even as he was recovering, it appears he was cheerfully running around the place, helping doctors and care-givers in their work, now being called a Hero!
It appears he knows everything about every patient admitted there and can tell in the blinking of an eye when each one of them is slated for discharge! We at MAHAN felt that we cannot have a better brand ambassador than him to infuse his indomitable spirit into our mission and inspire our entire team. So we decided to take him into our fold as one of our many volunteers.
When I spoke to him on the phone about it, as you rightly guessed, he said that MAHAN is where he wants to be! So when you pass by one of our Hospitals next time and if you happen to see a little fellow darting around and guiding and helping all those who seem lost and helpless, you know who he is!
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The mention of Vikram Hospital there in this long-winding article. The other day SOM reported that this hospital was readied to treat VIPs who were infected with Corona Virus, which does indicate that they do not want to be mixed with ordinary people!
In Europe, where the healthcare is free from the prime minister down to the garbage collectors, there is no special treatment based on individual;s position either in the society or in the government.
That is the mark of a civilised society,into which India does not belong to.
But then, all such misdeeds occurred only under British rule, the politicians who are the VIPs say!!
I read this author’s article, just to find out how much he mixed myth with reality.
The myth: all healthcare professionals, in Mysuru particularly the doctors are heroes.
The reality: heroes in the society are always those who sacrifice their own well being and help others who are more unfortunate than them. When Corona Virus swept across the Western world world during April and May, in Europe, the front line junior and senior doctors, the specialists, worked hard round the clock to save very ill patients, and doing so contracted the virus themselves, and a few of them died. The healthcare being free, these doctors got no special fee or no rewards. They were the real heroes. In New York city too it happened. There, a different strain of this virus,mutated from the large visiting population carriers, took the toll. In that process many specialists died. these were the heroes.
The reality again: knowing India and Mysuru well, with massive numbers of private hospitals ready to fleece the patients, the above sacrifice from the doctors here , never occurred and is not going to occur. That is the reality and rest of this article is waffle.
The Vikram Hospitals might have been prepared to welcome the VIPs. But, the truth is no such VIPs , the ones you see as the senior government minister or the rich , dare stay in Mysuru to brave this spread. The former, the senior ministers are in Bengaluru, where at least a few real specialists practice , they know it and hence stay put there; and the latter the rich, I suspect have left the country and live in countries like Singapore, which opened its border briefly after the first wave of the virus subsided. These rich have taken their ill-gotten money along with them. In Singapore, one can get the best medical treatment from real specialists, who entered the profession based not on reservation of medical college seats, but on merit through a competitive tough exam. Hence, the faith in them by Indian rich.
The DC knows this reality well, and hence takes extraordinary care to ensure that he does not get infected.
This wave of Corona virus is less brutal, as the death rate is low every where , except in the US, because of the strain of the Virus, the Americans are exposed to, resulting from the massive tourist population , many of them infected,and hence allowing the virus gene pool to mutate.