New Delhi: Even as scores of doctors start testing positive for Covid-19 across hospitals in Delhi — leading the city to large scale temporary shortages of healthcare workers, authorities are once again doing everything they can to increase bed capacity, which at AIIMS might take the shape of reserving the Trauma Centre for Covid patients once again.
But the Resident Doctors' Association at AIIMS on Wednesday vehemently protested against this, urging the institute's director not to convert the AIIMS Trauma Centre into a Covid Care facility.
They said that trauma services should not be ignored as most of the trauma victims are of young age who are the sole breadwinners of their families and have to step out amid this raging pandemic precisely for that reason.
While the doctors of the Centre-run hospital staged a protest on Wednesday evening, holding placards that read: "Trauma also matters" and "Every life matters", the RDA has also written a letter to the chief of the institute arguing that avenues like surgical block, MCh block, geriatric block, burns plastic block should be considered for
rendering services to coronavirus patients.
All trauma services were shifted to the main AIIMS campus on March 28, 2020 and the JPNA Trauma Centre was converted into a dedicated Covid care facility in view of the rising cases. The RDA said that they were thankful that the trauma services were shifted back to JPNATC one month ago.
"It took a month for trauma services to be restored to pre-Covid times. Now, COVID-19 cases are increasing rapidly but as we have seen in the last two waves of the pandemic, the cases of trauma are also not decreasing.
"With the conversion of JPNA trauma centre to COVID-19 centre, it is expected for the trauma patients to suffer a lot again. Most of the victims of trauma are of young age who are the sole breadwinners of their families," the RDA said in the letter on January 4.
This comes right after several RDAs in the city have been vehemently protesting against the delay in NEET-PG counselling for 2021 — due to which 48,000 doctors are waiting to fill positions in government hospitals. While hospitals in Delhi have already started seeing shortages in healthcare workers with many of them testing positive and going into isolation, the Indian Medical Association on Wednesday issued a statement raising the alarm that the infection rate was much higher in this wave and was exposing doctors and healthcare workers 5 to 10 times more than the general public.
The IMA noted that if the authorities do not arrange for human resources to be augmented in time, hospitals in Delhi and elsewhere across the country will face a severe crunch — as already being faced in multiple countries at the peak of the Omicron-propelled wave.