Centre call for deploying medical students on job :Guidelines issued by Union health ministry for the states

The instructions come amid a steep rise in cases nationwide — around 179,000 on Sunday

Guidelines specify the kind of responsibilities medical students have to discharge

G.S. Mudur   |   TT  |  New Delhi   |  11.01.22 : The Union health ministry on Monday released guidelines for the states to deploy medical and nursing students for Covid-19 care amid ballooning counts of new infections and uncertainty over when and where they would peak.

The ministry has flagged the need to augment human resources, although only five to 10 per cent of the diagnosed Covid-19 cases have needed hospitalisation so far during the current surge, compared with 20 to 23 per cent during India’s second wave.

“The situation is dynamic and evolving, therefore, the need for hospitalisation may also change rapidly,” health secretary Rajesh Bhushan wrote to the states.

His letter urged them to “keep a daily watch” on the numbers of patients in hospital and on oxygen, intensive care and ventilator support.

The guidelines specify the types of tasks that final-year MBBS students, interns, junior and senior residents, third and fourth-year BSc nursing students, and first and second-year MSc nursing students could be assigned if the need arises to deploy them for Covid-19 care.

The instructions come amid a steep rise in Covid-19 cases nationwide — around 179,000 on Sunday, compared with 158,000 on Saturday — driven by simultaneous surges in multiple states.

Experts say it is unclear how high and how quickly the surge will peak. Efforts to predict the peak counts have led to divergent estimates, from 180,000 to 800,000 daily new infections.

Although the hospitalisation rates remain less than half of what they were during the earlier wave, public health experts have cautioned that shortages in hospital resources could occur at any location where the numbers rise beyond local hospital resources.

India’s count of cases caused by omicron — a fast-spreading and immune-evasive variant — grew on Monday to over 4,000. 

The ministry said the surge was driven by both omicron and delta, the variant that had fuelled the second wave.

“This rise is being driven by omicron and the continued presence of delta in large geographies across the country,” Bhushan said.

Epidemiologists have underlined that delta is still in circulation and could cause infections in prior-infected people or in vaccinated people whose immune responses have waned.

The ministry has asked the states to review the requirement and availability of healthcare workers in each healthcare facility every day, stagger their services, and restrict elective procedures in hospitals.

It has also asked the states to ensure that the Covid-19 hospitalisation charges levied by private hospitals are 

“reasonable” and there are mechanisms to “initiate actions in instances of over-charging”.