RIU facing shortage of specialists to manage COVID-19 patients

Rawalpindi : Corona Management Centre at Rawalpindi Institute of Urology has got once again operational properly on Tuesday to deal with COVID-19 patients in town though it has been facing shortage of specialist doctors to provide healthcare to corona patients.

After restoration of arrangements as per directives of Specialized Healthcare and Medical Education Department (SHC&ME Department) at Government of the Punjab, the CMC at RIU admitted the first COVID-19 patient on Monday evening though he was discharged late at night and on Tuesday morning; the centre admitted as many as 10 new patients who are undergoing treatment at RIU.

The SHC&ME Department has asked the RIU administration to revive COVID related arrangements at full capacity as was done in June 2020. The arrangements have been restored to the level that was on June 20 and RIU is now capable of catering to the needs of around 250 patients easily, said Additional Medical Superintendent at RIU Dr. Tahir Rizvi while talking to ‘The News’.

He said the CMC has services of 33 doctors available at the moment while in June, it had over 67 doctors to provide care to COVID-19 patients. Also there is a shortage of Class-IV employees at RIU which were indicted on daily-wage basis.

It is important that the number of COVID-19 patients is continuously on a sharp rise for the last one week as in last 24 hours, another 113 patients were tested positive from the district taking tally to 7937.

A total of 339 new patients have been tested positive for coronavirus illness in last 24 hours from Islamabad Capital Territory and Rawalpindi district while the virus claimed another five lives in the twin cities that has taken death toll from the region to 614. As many as 226 new patients were reported from ICT in last 24 hours.

District Health Officer ICT Dr. Muhammad Zaeem Zia said the suspension of mobile phone services in the previous two days caused a lot of problems for the health department in carrying out surveillance, testing and tracing activities.

It is important that the number of COVID-19 patients reported in last two days was much lower as compared to the number of patients being reported previously. When asked, Dr. Zaeem said it would be assessed in next couple of days whether the depression in number of cases was due to suspension of communication services or it was real.

In last 24 hours, as many as three patients died of the disease in the federal capital from where a total of 24,444 patients have so far been tested positive of which 20,498 have recovered while 260 have lost their lives. The number of active cases of the illness in ICT was 3686 on Tuesday.

Another two patients including one female died of the disease at Holy Family Hospital in last 24 hours in Rawalpindi district. On Tuesday, there were 730 active cases of the disease in the district. The virus has claimed a total of 354 lives in the district.

62 confirmed COVID-19 patients are undergoing treatment at the healthcare facilities in the district and 668 are in home isolation while 1931 suspects have been under home quarantine, said Executive District Officer (Health) Rawalpindi Dr. Sohail Ahmed Chaudhary while talking to ‘The News’.