BENGALURU: The country needs 1.5 lakh nurses, 50,000 doctors who are young and skilled in ICU care to work for the next one year on Covid care, renowned cardiologist Dr Devi Shetty said on Monday while speaking at the virtual launch of Covid Healthcare Professionals (CHP).
“Final year students of BSc nursing, doctors in final year PG, MB or DNB courses should be considered passed without writing the exam, if they work for the next one year with Covid patients. We also need telemetric devices that will check BP, respiration, pulse rate, ECG analysis, risk, saturation level to replace nurses’ touch for corona patients.”
“They can come in only in advanced stages like ventilator handling. The data can be sent to senior doctors, who cannot enter the ICU, for analysis,” Dr Shetty said. He said that private medical colleges should adopt the 740-odd government district hospitals and convert them into medical colleges.
The government must allow private hospitals to charge as per market rates, so they can in turn cross-subsidise rates for patients in need.
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Doctors, nurses and paramedics can register on the CHP platform and get suitable jobs in hospitals looking to hire staff. Of the 1,400 professionals registered on CHP, 51 medicos and four hospitals are from Karnataka. The platform is built by ECHO India, a healthcare non-profit, in association with Naukri.com, and will profile medical skills and match them with hospitals.
Already, 60 hospitals have registered on it and the aim is to have 10,000 healthcare workers on it, treating 1,00,000 Covid patients. Dr Arvind Lal, chairman, Dr Lal Path Labs, said there is a huge shortage of health professionals, with India requiring 10 lakh doctors, 20 lakh nurses and 30 lakh paramedics. Through this portal, a person registers and finds a match based on location and language.
“They are asked questions on the amount of time they can dedicate, their area of specialization and a set of people is listed and sent to hospitals, which in turn conduct one-on-one interviews. The selected people are trained to handle the coronavirus and how to protect oneself while on duty. They are free to negotiate salary with the employers,” Dr (Col) Kumud Rai, Chairman & Managing Trustee, ECHO India, told TNIE on the sidelines.
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