A discourse on the website of the medical journal The Lancet authored by 21 people including Biocon's Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and India’s top surgeon Dr Devi Shetty has suggested eight measures to take to prepare for the future resurgence of Coronavirus in India.
Read 8 points suggested by the experts:-
1) The idea of the multipurpose approach is flawed, thus, essential health services must be decentralised. The reason to decentralise is that the number of Coronavirus cases and health services varies from district to district.
2) A transparent national pricing policy and caps on the process of all essential health services must be ensured which includes ambulances, oxygen, essential medicines and hospital charges.
Hospital charges should not be out of patients' expenditure and expenses should be covered by existing health insurance plans for all people, just like few states have adopted.
3) Details on the Covid-19 management must be publicly implemented and distributed that should be clear and evidence-based. The information should contain appropriate guidelines for home care and treatment primary care that are globally adopted. District hospital units must have dissemination in local languages combining local circumstances and clinical practice.
4) priority groups for vaccination must be decided based on data to optimise the available vaccine doses, which can be slowly increased as supplies grow.
Vaccination is for public welfare and should not be left to market mechanisms.
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5) Human resources available at all sectors of the health system including the private sector should be disposed of for responding to Covid emergency and sufficiently resourced.
Personal protective equipment, supervision on the using clinical interventions, insurance, and mental health support must be properly resourced as well.
6) Transparency in the government data collection and modelling must be ensured so that districts are properly able to prepare for the expected caseload in the coming weeks.
Health system officials need data on age and sex-disaggregated COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and mortality rates, community-level coverage of vaccination, community-based tracking of the effectiveness of treatment protocols and long-term outcomes.
7) Community engagement and public participation must be proactive in responding to Covid management.
It is historically evident that Grassroots civil societies have played a crucial role in public participation in health care and other development activities, like strengthening the COVID-19 response in Mumbai.
8) The deep pain and risk to health caused by loss of livelihoods should be decreased by making plans for cash transfers by the state to workers in India that has a huge informal economy and seasonal jobs who have lost their employment.
For the formal working sectors, employers need to retain all workers, irrespective of the status of contracts, through a government assurance of offering compensation to these companies when the economy recovers.