Ahmedabad: All hospitals with 20+ beds must keep 50% for Covid-19 cases

GANDHINAGAR: Following a high court order, the state government has issued a government resolution to force all private and trust-run hospitals with a capacity of 20 or more beds to reserve 50% of the beds for Covid-19 patients.

In Ahmedabad city, one of the Covid-19 hotspots in the country, the state government and the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) have already begun calculating the total bed capacity of private and trust-run hospitals.The entire city has 12,978 beds capacity as revealed to the AMC by 985 registered hospitals within the municipal limits. Of these, there are 117 hospitals which have 20 beds or more and if these hospitals reserve 50% of their beds the number adds up to 2,828 beds. There are 10 hospitals in the city which have revealed to the AMC that they have 100 beds or more, according to the reply to a recent RTI application made by a Kalupur resident, Pankaj Bhatt. The largest number of beds are with GCRI (750). But a bulk of the hospitals, almost 88% of the hospitals — that is 867 hospitals of the 985 registered within the AMC limits — have a capacity of 20 beds or less. This capacity adds up to 7,322 beds.
Just recently, since May 15, the AMC was in the process of signing MoUs with 42 major hospitals in the city and has managed to ensure the addition of close to 1,500 beds to the existing capacity of civil hospitals in Asarwa and Sola and the AMC-run SVP hospital. This was by far the largest drive for adding beds to the existing capacity. Hospitals which did not agree or were delaying in their response to requisition requests, almost 17 of them, were issued show-cause notices by the AMC and AUDA. The hospitals were asked why criminal or civil charges should not lodged against them. “We had arranged 40 buses for staff members of these private hospitals who were coming from various areas of the city during lockdown,” said a senior AMC official.