Kriti Agrawal –
In the midst of the current covid 19 outbreak, the Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force (NTF) 12 member committee has developed a system for calculating the country’s oxygen needs that considers all levels of treatment.
The group advised that hospitals be audited, including their pipeline systems, to ensure prudent use of oxygen, claiming that such audits lower utilisation by 10 to 20%.
A number of suggestions were made by the National Task Force on the technique for allocating oxygen to states and Union Territories, including adopting guideline procedures for home-based or facility-based isolation and self-monitoring programmes, as well as non-hospital covid care facilities.
The committee informed the Supreme Court that processes like oxygen audits, pipeline cleaning, and patient triage systems should be adopted at the hospital level based on its recommendations.
The Panel stated that, “Because it is a dynamic process, the allotment may be revised every week after reviewing trends, unless there are immediate requirements that granular data on hospitals should be available, which necessitates the creation of a dynamic hospital registry with unique hospital IDs.”
The panel proposed creating a state dashboard to track supply and demand, which would include real-time data on available infrastructure, beds, and actual oxygen usage at each healthcare facility.
Based on the number of Oxygen beds and ICU beds, a methodology for calculating oxygen demand for primary, secondary, and tertiary hospitals was proposed.