As Gandhi Hospital brims, health dept to set up swine flu centre at OGH

HYDERABAD: With the swine flu ward at Gandhi Hospital, where complicated cases of swine flu are being rushed from across the state, chock-a-block with patients, the state health department has now planned to set up another specialty nodal centre at the Osmania General Hospital .

Also with a three-fold jump in cases, the health department authorities have pressed into action nodal swine flu teams for quick screening of patients and arranging logistics.

The nodal centre at OGH will accommodate patients who develop severe respiratory stress along with other red flag symptoms of swine flu like breathlessness, chest pain, drowsiness, fall in blood pressure, sputum mixed with blood and bluish discolouration of nails in addition to fever and cough.

As the condition of such patients can progress rapidly to pneumonia and even lead to cardiac failure, such patients need intensive care.

While all district hospitals are equipped to handle swine flu patients who are stable, nodal centres are meant for tackling complicated cases.

In fact, if the number of cases continue to rise further, all six teaching hospitals in the state might require to be upgraded to nodal centres.

Apart from the nodal centre coming up at OGH, two more nodal centres are currently under consideration to deal with the alarming rise in the number of cases. These are likely to come up at Fever Hospital and Warangal. "Ventilators have been made available at the special ward at OGH. We are upgrading more hospitals, which have the intensive care (ICU) facility, to nodal centres for handling complicated cases. A round of intensive training has been completed for a few centres last week," said Dr K Shankar, director, Institute of Preventive Medicine (IPM).

Meanwhile, health authorities have not only sounded an alert and sent an internal set of advisories and recommendations to all government hospitals two weeks back, teams have also been trained at various hospitals to man the isolation wards.