Despite over 1,000 virus cases, all beds vacant in 4 dist hosps in Telangana

Hyderabad: At a time when the Telangana government is scaling up healthcare facilities to control the spread of novel coronavirus, four hospitals in the districts do not have a single bed occupied in their Covid-19 wards.

While most hospitals across the state do not have vacant beds for over 15 days now, the district hospital Utnoor, Adilabad; district hospital Alampur in Jogulamba Gadwal; district hospital in Jayshankar Bhupalpally; and area hospital Domakonda in Kamareddy district, haven’t had a single patient for months. These hospitals have 143 beds earmarked for Covid-19 patients but are lying unused.

These four districts have seen over 1000 new Covid-19 cases in the last seven days.

Senior health department officials who stumbled upon this data during a routine survey said there could be many reasons including poor awareness about Covid-19, especially in deep pockets of Telangana and stigma regarding the disease.

“Districts have a problem of manpower. In the current pandemic it has become even more severe as most of our staff are anyway stressed. We will address this issue soon,” said a senior official from the state health department.

Healthcare experts say that the district health infrastructure in the state was better when compared to other states but bed utilisation requires not just infrastructure.

“The fact that there are zero utilisation in some places while other facilities in same district show utilisation indicate they are not preferred,” said professor Subodh Kandamuthan, director Centre for Healthcare Management, Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI)

For instance, in Adilabad, Utnoor has no bed utilization, but RIMS medical college has 20 percent utilisation and a private hospital is also showing hospitalisation which means patients may be preferring either the medical college or the private facilities, he said.

“Since all these places are either tribal belts or remote areas, there is a need for focused health communication and district-wise manpower to be ready for an increase in the requirement,” Kandamuthan added.

While district facilities already have a challenge of manpower, the stigma of Covid-19 has ensured that many healthcare workers remain absent from work, adding to the problem.

“We are getting calls from districts for Covid relief work and funerals regularly as we believe the fear and stigma among health care workers is very high in districts. One out of three funeral request are for dropping the deceased to districts not only in Telangana but also in AP, including Kurnool, Nandyal, Kadapa and in Nalgonda,” said Mujtaba Hasan Askari from Helping Hand Foundation.

Turns out, some hospitals in districts also have minimum bed occupancy and are largely vacant.

District hospital Kamaredy, which has 40 Covid-19 beds, has less than five utilised, while District hospital Medak, which has 46 beds, also have less than five occupied at any given point of time.