The 'Mukhya Mantri Upchaar Yojna' launched on May 7, 2021 has turned out as another step in ensuring availability of free treatment for Covid-19 in Madhya Pradesh.
Hospitalization trends in MP show that less than 20% of patients require hospitalisation with oxygen/ICU/HDU support. But full recovery can take up to weeks, with the hospital admission and treatment bills exerting enormous pressure on the family’s limited means in an already stretched economy due to Covid-19.
The unprecedented rise in cases during the second wave led to increasing pressure on the public health infrastructure, raising the need for augmentation of beds and allied equipment across the State to ensure that nobody, irrespective of their economic and social status be denied the right to treatment for Covid-19.
Hence, GoMP made concerted efforts to not only increase the capacity of already existing public facilities but also partnered with Private Facilities to quickly ramp up the access to free treatment.
Public facilities:
The last wave in Madhya Pradesh peaked at 22,000 Active Cases with maximum hospitalization requirement of 4500 patients across Madhya Pradesh. The public infrastructure across districts was more than adequate to effectively manage the case load, with less than 50% occupancy observed across Government tertiary health care centers- the Government medical colleges.
But the State Government had already started planning for the worst, rapidly increasing bed capacities across primary, secondary and tertiary health care centers, ensuring every district had the adequate number of beds in the worst-case scenario.
To aid this, a detailed analysis of the spread, severity of the disease and need for hospitalization was undertaken to forecast the bed requirement per district.
Steps were undertaken to ensure not only the establishment of beds, but the availability of critical equipment, drugs and consumables was also ensured along with timely hiring and capacity building of Human Resources.
The table below shows the number of public DCH and DCHCs including the total bed availability in May last year contrasted with current availability of infrastructure.
The number of oxygen beds have been increased almost 3 times, while ICU/HDU beds have been increased multi-fold to ensure appropriate treatment for each patient. Further, GoMP has already started preparing for the 3rd wave with a further augmentation plan for increasing the beds by further 30% in place.
Long-term contracts with Private Hospitals - Medical colleges are functioning across the private sector too within the State. The State Government has contracted with the hospitals run by these private medical colleges, so that these hospitals could provide a fixed number of isolation, oxygen and HDU / ICU beds to the State Government. These hospitals are required to treat all the admitted patients as per the protocols issued by the ICMR, free of charge on beds reserved for the State Government.
Medicines like Remdisivir are kept out of this contract and are supplied by the State Government directly to these hospitals and no patient has to pay any charges for the same. The State Government is paying the hospitals fixed and variable charges every month based on the number of beds.
Under the above arrangement, the State Government has a total of 3,675 beds, including 820 isolation beds, 2,243 HDU and 612 ICU beds across the private medical colleges, on which all the admitted patients are being treated free of cost.