BMC directs private hospitals to reserve 20 per cent beds for poor

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has asked all the private hospitals in the city with COVID-19 wards to keep 20 per cent of their beds reserved for the poor. They have also been instructed to make similar provisions for the ICU wards. This has been done so that the civic body can refer poor patients from the BMC-run hospitals to these places. The needy patients will not have to pay for the beds but the hospitals will be reimbursed under the state government health scheme. 

The decision was taken on Saturday at a virtual meeting with Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray. Talking to TOI, BMC Commissioner Praveen Pardeshi said, "Getting ICU beds and COVID beds reserves for poor in private hospitals is the key motive."

Pradeshi added that private hospitals have close to 2,000 such beds and BMC will be getting 20 per cent of them. The civic body's disaster control room will coordinate between civic and private hospitals about the admission process for reserved beds.

A senior BMC official who attended the meeting said that most f the private hospitals running COVID wards are charity trust-run organisations. He added that these hospitals will be reimbursed while the patients will not be charged.

The key factor behind taking the decision is the inadequacy of ICU beds in public sector hospitals. An official said that by reserving beds in private hospitals, the burden will be reduced on civic hospitals. He further added that along with this, private hospitals are better equipped to deal with critical patients, and the civic-run hospitals are overloaded currently.

Explaining the rise in need of beds for COVID-19 patients, senior bureaucrat Manisha Mhaiskar said in a Facebook post, "Earlier, projections for patients likely to need a hospital bed was done at 10%. But current experience indicates that a good 30-40% of corona positive patients occupy hospital beds. Many are, of course, asymptomatic but are either elderly or with co-morbidities."

Alongside, the government has also taken steps to augment the bed capacity in the state. Last week, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) had also started construction of a quarantine and isolation facility with over 1,000 beds.