The second wave of Covid-19 has accelerated throughout the country and healthcare workers on the frontline have been battling the inevitable. While infections are surpassing the daily count, teams at hospitals are not only tackling the case loads but have also have tested positive themselves.

Dr. Harish Pillai, CEO- Aster India, Aster DM Healthcare on how the hospital chain is tackling the situation internally to safeguard healthcare workers.

“As the COVID pandemic surges as a second wave impacting large parts of the country, it has also impacted several Aster units located across the 5 states. All the frontline healthcare workers deployed for the management of COVID are making use of their experience and knowledge of the first wave to handle the situation better this time. We are also fortunate that due to the prioritization of the government to vaccinate healthcare workers in the first round of vaccination, we have successfully managed to vaccinate almost all our staff. However, we still have incidences of some of our frontline workers being COVID positive despite having received the two shots. Thankfully, most of them are only showing mild symptoms and can be managed in a homecare environment and did not warrant hospitalization. The deployment of COVID wards are exclusively segregated to prevent a mix of patients and staff; the duty roster is managed in a manner that staffs are deployed for COVID duty spanning roughly about a week after which they are given a break and a fresh team takes over. Thus was we can avoid the burnout of staff from exhaustion – both physical and emotional. We are also watching out for mental fatigue due to intense exposure to clinical morbidities and mortality on some occasions.

At Aster, we have facilitated access to mental health professionals and there are also helpline numbers, including access to an app powered by AI for use by our team members. The rapid demand for ICU beds has put pressure on our existing resources. In some instances, we have been forced to go beyond our frontline workers and deploy other staff, including clinicians from surgical specialties for COVID duty after they undergo specific COVID management bridging programs. We have a central team for Infectious diseases and infection control that coordinates with clinical teams across the network to understand changes in clinical symptomology and clear queries on clinical algorithms; this has proved very beneficial due to the free exchange of experiences and best practices. Our HR teams are also scouting for rapid deployment of additional staff specifically, nurses to augment our current capacity”.