Bikaner hospital aids district in cutting oxygen use: Report

The hospital has employed nursing students to monitor and regulate patients’ oxygen intake

Careful monitoring and innovative rationing of oxygen supplies in Bikaner’s only government hospital has helped the district drastically cut down on its oxygen use and save lives amid the country’s second coronavirus wave.

Under PBM Hospital’s “Oxygen Mitra” initiative, around 140 students of Bikaner’s Government School of Nursing have been employed to perform a singular task—monitoring and regulating the use of the life-saving gas, the Indian Express reported.

The efforts of these nurses have helped halve the daily per patient oxygen intake to 2.1 cylinders and have taken the district, which depends on the hospital for 70% of its caseload, from the top of Rajasthan’s per patient oxygen use table in April to among the lowest in May.

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Oxygen became a precious commodity in the country in late April and early May as the massive second Covid wave flooded hospitals with patients and strained their medical supplies. Many patients lost their lives as hospitals’ oxygen supplies ran dry.

In mid-May, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot took to Twitter to sound the alarm when the state had the fourth-highest number of active cases in the country, saying the situation was “extremely fragile” as the state was not being able to utilise the entire oxygen allocation it had been given.

However, Bikaner had not lost a single patient to lack of oxygen, District Magistrate Namit Mehta told the daily. The Bikaner hospital’s initiative was also acknowledged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a recent meeting with district magistrates.

PBM realised in April that the per patient consumption would not be sustainable as the caseload grew, despite having its own tank. With this in mind, the hospital assigned each nursing student supervision duties for 30 beds at the end of April.

The hospital didn’t stop at monitoring. It also deployed an engineering tweak and rearranged oxygen beds so that “high-flow” and “low-flow” patients got the amount of oxygen they required and wastage was minimised.

As of Thursday, Rajasthan had 27,408 active Covid cases, with Bikaner accounting for 1,002 of them.