KUCHING, Sept 13: Daily health assessments for Covid-19 patients under Categories 1 and 2 can be outsourced to doctors in private practice, suggests Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP) Women’s chief Kho Teck Wan.
Noting that there there are 29,788 Covid-19 patients undergoing home quarantine in Sarawak, Kho urged the Sarawak State Health Department (JKNS) and Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) to reach out to these doctors who are willing to participate in providing daily health assessment phone calls to these patients.
“Yesterday, we had two brought-in-dead cases in Kuching. Both the 38 and 46-year-old males had no underlying health conditions. The 38-year-old was positive since Sept 10 while the 46-year-old male was positive since Sept 8.
“Although home quarantined patients are required to update their health condition via MySejahtera and Google form daily, a system to quickly identify and retrieve a patient whose health condition has progressively deteriorated at home should be put in place immediately.
“JKNS and SDMC should also consider outsourcing the physical Covid-19 Assessment Centre (CAC) to private practice doctors for a fixed period, allowing more government healthcare personnel to be placed in hospital settings to concentrate on saving critically ill patients in the hospitals,” Kho said in a statement.
She opined that the doctor-to-patient ratio will be better with this arrangement, which indirectly improves the quality of healthcare for patients in home quarantine.
Other than that, doctors in private practice can also escalate any case that needs medical attention to government hospitals, which could potentially prevented brought-in-dead cases.
“As we work towards living with Covid-19, our focus should be on saving lives and reduce the daily death (cases) due to this virus.
“Therefore, I urge the private practice doctors to consider working with JKNS and SDMC should such a call be made to provide health assessment to home quarantined Covid-19 patients,” Kho said. — DayakDaily
