Karnataka govt to rope in final year MBBS, PG students for Covid-19 duty

The state government has directed final year students of MBBS, PG medical and super-specialty students to report for Covid duty to meet shortage of healthcare professionals amid exponential rise in the number of cases.

In an order that was made available to the media on Friday, the director of medical education (DME) directed all such students to report to the department after completing their exams.

"The heads of the institutions are directed to inform the students to report to office of the DME," the order said, adding that the registrar of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences shall instruct non-allopathic graduates to report to the university.

The release accompanying the order said Medical Education Minister Dr K Sudhakar has directed the officials to utilise the final year students for Covid duties as the government has been facing shortage of staff to achieve the testing targets.

"Along with direct recruitment, the final year students of lab technician courses, Science students of RGUHS and volunteers will be given proper training before assigning Covid duties to them," it said.

The step, he said, was necessary to meet the target of conducting 30,000 tests per day in Bengaluru. The service of staff from 80 private labs and fever clinics is being utilised already. Mobile units are also running short of trained manpower. Therefore, necessary arrangement is being made under Disaster Management Act, the Minister had told the officials.

Zone-wise dashboard

To streamline flow of information to enable real-time management, the minister has also directed that dashboards should be set up at zonal-level to share war room data.

He also instructed them to recruit data entry operators from Keonics. "There are 12,000 containment zones in the city alone. There is a need to quickly find out ILI and SARI cases and the information has to be shared with zonal officers. Also, decisions have to be made to admit them in Covid care centres and hospitals. It is also the duty of zonal teams to provide ambulances wherever necessary," the minister said.