New Delhi: India's prominent healthcare bodies on Tuesday appealed to the government to put an old roster system in place for oxygen supply, directly from vendors to hospital and desist individuals holding cylinders at home and black marketing.
Association of Healthcare Providers-India (AHPI), Consortium of Accredited Healthcare Organisations (CAHO), IMA Hospital Board and Delhi Nursing Home Forum have formed a COVID coordination committee to mitigate the traumatic situation due to the second wave.
"The committee aims to improve synergy between different agencies for ensuring uninterrupted oxygen supply and proper care of COVID patients," an official told ETV Bharat.
The committee emphasised that the single most important medicine for the present COVID strain in the second wave is oxygen and given the shortage of resources, there is an urgent need to improve synergy between agencies to minimise fatalities.
The second wave of COVID-19 is found to affect the lungs much more, to the extent that the requirement of oxygen is almost 2 to 3 times as compared to what was consumed during the first wave last year. This has resulted in a shortage of medical oxygen.
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"When patients are scrambling for hospital beds, the hospital and nursing homes are unable to take fresh admission, just because there is no guarantee of oxygen supply. The country in general and Delhi NCR in particular, is passing through one of the worst phases in respect of suffering by population on account of COVID pandemic," the official said.
The committee in its recommendations told the government that the erstwhile system of vendors supplying oxygen was disrupted by the reallocation of vendors to different hospitals.
"This has created big confusion. Vendors are no more supplying to small hospitals and asking them to collect oxygen cylinders from their sites. Hospitals as such are putting their bulk of time in procuring oxygen rather than care of patients. A new trend has also emerged where individuals are rushing to vendors and buying oxygen cylinders to be hoarded at home," the committee said in its recommendations to the government.