Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has asked the private hospitals and nursing homes to maintain an exclusive database of employees who are residing in slum areas in the capital city.
The BMC also asked the hospital authorities to make accommodation arraignment for those slum dweller employees within the hospital premises as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
About one third of population of the BMC is staying in slum areas where social distancing is practically not possible because of small houses and high population density.
In the recent past several healthcare workers and staffs in private hospitals and nursing homes have been detected positive who usually resides in slum area. Frequent movement of hospital staffs to slum areas therefore poses risk of spread of the virus quickly, BMC Commissioner Prem Chandra Chaudhary said.
To obviate this possible risk, the BMC issued the following order for greater public interest.
1. All the private hospitals/Nursing Homes shall maintain an exclusive employee database who are residing in slum areas of BMC.
2. The employees of the slum areas need to be kept in shift for 14 days and the hospital authorities will make accommodation arrangement of those slum dweller employees within the hospital premises.
3. After the 14 days shift, the set of employees to be relieved of the duties after their COVID testing and negative report. The next set of employees will then be given duties and the same procedure will be adopted if the next set of employees also belong to slum areas. The accommodation of the employees may be done by observing all sorts of formalities applicable for hospitals/nursing homes (In the light of COVID-19).
4. All the private hospitals/nursing homes shall nominate a responsible officer of their organization as nodal officer and share the name, designation and contact number along with the preliminary shift arrangement made by the private hospital/nursing homes shall be shared with the ADUPHO-UH.
The subsequent shift arrangements made will also need to be shared as and when done with the ADUPHO-UH.
As a part of slum strategy BMC has already taken several steps like active surveillance, management of symptomatic cases in the past.