How hospital is handling the COVID-19 situation and how the public can help prevent the infection?
Sakra hospital has set up 3 levels of precautionary and therapeutic measures. All critical care areas created for COVID-19 will be manned primarily by ICU personnel supported by ER personnel if needed. Essentially, we have made arrangements and are enforcing:
- Social distancing
- Hand hygiene
- Cough etiquette
- Mask wearing
- Crowd control
Not just patients, all people coming in are actively screened for temperature. We are also screening for travel history to help segregate the high-risk vs the low risk groups to prevent local transmission. We are screening for symptoms in all persons walking in. We expect the public to cooperate as it is in their best interest. From a medical point of view, we have set up 3 levels of precautionary and therapeutic measures.
- No contact consultation/ quick review/ follow up. Various modalities are being used web/video consultation
- Walk in patients with respiratory symptom can also be screened by visiting the hygienically maintained screening booths and consult a doctor live across a glass in a negative pressure chamber
- If further examination is needed, the patients are treated in the specially constructed (COVID-19 ward) where slightly ill patients needing hospital care are treated symptomatically and sample collection is done by doctors and nurses in “spacesuits”
- For the really ill and patients with severe respiratory symptoms needing immediate intervention, special negative pressure isolation chambers are created to perform immediate life procedures like airway management and ventilation.
- Further ICU care
At Sakra, the emergency room has been redesigned and renovated on a war footing to ensure that emergency care is given to any COVID-19 patient. Special care is being taken to prevent staff’s infection and cross infection between patients does not take place.
Message/Special request to the public:
- Stay at home as much as possible
- Use well known home remedies for simple illnesses. If unsure, use video consultation to get in touch with your doctor or you may visit the booths
- If you are really sick, medical staff and doctors are there for you. Only, be prepared to see a doctor in a spacesuit treating you till you’re clear of any dangerous disease
- Help protect medical staff and their health. They will in turn help many others.
We wish for or have a policy for zero infection to staff and zero cross-infection. We can help us by practicing the following:
- Keeping the place clean
- Follow the new rules
- Maintain social distancing
- Don’t bring old people and ill children to the hospital
- Strictly adhere to one patient one attendee policy
- Wash your hands frequently
- Do not discard your masks, soiled tissues here and there
- Ask the staff or discard in a yellow bucket with a biohazard sign on it
- Follow cough etiquette
- If you have respiratory symptoms declared early you may actually have saved your own life and a thousand others.
Dr Bevin D’Silva – Department of Emergency Medicine
Sakra World Hospital, Bengaluru 560103
