MillenniumPost
Delhi

Draw up action plan for critical patients: Kejriwal

NEW DELHI: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has directed Health Minister Satyendar Jain to submit a concrete action plan within a week to ensure that critical patients requiring life support do not have to run around hospital in times of crises.
Taking cognisance of the reports which have highlighted that the life of a newborn child could not be saved since four government hospitals refused to admit the child citing lack of critical care beds with ventilator facilities, Kejriwal has asked Jain to place the action plan before him till the September-end.
The primary objective of this concrete action plan will be to ensure that the live data of functional critical care facilities in all Delhi government hospitals are readily and easily available in the first place.
"It has been noticed in a number of cases that family members of patients in critical conditions, who rush them to hospitals are turned away citing the common excuses of either lack of facilities or non-availability of beds. Now the ordeal starts for the family," the government said in a statement.
It added that the families do not have information as to where would such facility be available.
Family members are forced to rush critical patients from one hospital to another, till any hospital if at all, agrees to admit such patients.
The Chief Minister has asked the Health Minister to include in the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that the hospital where a critical patient is first brought for admission, will ensure that the patient gets immediate life-saving care.
He has further directed that from now on, if for some justified reason, like any hospital lacking life-saving facilities or unavailability of beds when a patient in a critical condition is brought for admission, then it will be the mandatory emergency duty of that hospital to find out in which other hospital such a facility is available, and it should be part of the clearly laid down Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that the patient is sent to that hospital without any delay.
Kejriwal asserted that, "The hospital will have to ensure shifting of the patient."
He has made it clear that loss of lives due lack of facilities in the hospitals of Delhi is unacceptable since the government is committed to provide best health care for the residents of the national capital, and it has allocated nearly Rs 6,000 crore in the current financial year for the health sector.
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