As touch, taste and smell were affected by covid, war rooms in hospitals used sight and sound to monitor patients.
Now a new war room that links all hospitals in the State is being readied for the third wave
Covid affects three of your five senses.
You lose your sense of taste and smell, and touch is forbidden for fear of infection.
At such a time, sight and sound bear all the weight of human communication.
The very first war room and visual monitoring system set up at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases (RGICD), tapped into these two senses to monitor patients and keep them communicating with their loved ones.
RGICD was one of the first hospitals to install CCTV cameras inside the wards to monitor ICU patients and doctors remotely, in addition to keeping patients’ families up to date about the health status of their loved ones.
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After many allegations were made against hospitals in connection with the covid treatment, the Health Department directed all the hospitals in the State to install cameras inside the covid wards to supervise patients and doctors remotely.
From the control room we can see what is going on inside the wards and give directions to the medical staff.
As we don’t allow the family inside the wards, we allow them to visit the war room and speak to the patients— Dr C Nagaraja, Director of RGICD
The first covid case in the city was reported in the RGICD on March 9, 2020, when the hospital had already set up the visual monitoring with a two-way communication system inside the wards.
Dr.
C Nagaraja, Director of RGICD said, “We were the first hospital in the City to set up a telemonitoring system and a war room inside the hospital.
From the control room, we could see what was going on inside the wards and speak to the medical staff directly to give them instructions.
As we don’t allow the family members to step inside the wards, we allow them to visit the war room and speak to the patients.
It helped a lot during the second wave too.”
The Victoria Hospital which turned into a full-fledged covid hospital in March 2020 also set up a war room inside the Bangalore Medical College in April to monitor patients being treated inside the wards, said Dr Jayanthi, Dean of BMCRI.
“There are three blocks in the hospitals with several floors.
We monitor all these remotely from the war room.
We have mobile phones allotted to doctors and nursing staff on each floor.
If we see a situation developing on one floor and doctors are busy, we call doctors from another floor to take care of the emergency.
We can give them directions remotely and keep ourselves apprised about the patients,” said Dr Jayanthi.
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The hospital also set up a grievance cell to update families about the progress of patients.
Dr Santosh HR, BMC grievance coordinator said that initially, they were only a 10-member team which added more members in the following months.
He said, “During the second wave, our hospital became a 1,000-bed hospital and all of us had to work around the clock.
We had three doctors working on a 24-hour shift per day with a break of alternate days and each of them would answer 300 calls per day.
They would supervise the visuals and also attend to calls.
We would get multiple calls per minute and we had to include doctors, professors and students including those from the government dental college during the peak.
About 100 of us worked together and spoke to the family members, updating them about the patient’s health and during the peak, none of us was able to take breaks to eat or drink a sip of water.”
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Dr PG Girish, DME (Directorate of medical education), said, “During the second wave when there were a lot of complaints against doctors, the health department directed all hospitals to install cameras so that the department could supervise the hospitals remotely.
The deadline was May end and notices were issued from the department to set it up immediately.
Many hospitals are still in process of doing it while some have already installed them.
We are setting up a new war room where visuals and data from all the hospitals from across the State will be monitored and this will be done in a month or two so that we are prepared for the expected third wave.”
Manjunath, DC Urban said that all the government facilities in the Bengaluru rural area have been set up with cameras and monitoring systems which are being monitored by the medical superintendent of the respective hospitals.
