Apollo rolls out project to support isolation care

Of the 500 rooms created in first phase, 100 will be for Hyderabad

Apollo Hospitals Group which launched Project Kavach, an integrated response plan to tackle COVID-19, four days ago, has rolled out ‘Project Stay I’, an innovative social impact initiative to support isolation care across India.

In the first phase, 500 rooms are being created with 100 each in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and the rest in other cities in partnership with SBI, HUL, OYO, Zomato and Lemon Tree Hotels.

More rooms soon

Addressing a virtual conference, Apollo Hospitals Group joint MD Sangita Reddy, along with partners supporting the strategy, on Monday said that they were looking to add 50 to 100 rooms per week depending on the demand and up to 5,000 rooms for patients with mild symptoms to stay in isolation with medically supervised beds and through tele-medicine. If needed, it can be scaled up to 20,000 to 30,000 rooms across the country. The location of isolation rooms will be available on the website.

For those who can’t have home quarantine facility with five to seven people staying in a house with single bathroom, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, SBI and Deutsche Bank have come forward to cover the cost of isolation rooms for such socio-economic group. Apollo will not charge for the medical supervision through its telemedicine network.

Window of opportunity

Kiran Majumdar Shaw, managing director of Biocon Ltd, who formed a group with Sangita Reddy and others to rope in partners from the private sector to support and augment the government efforts to contain the epidemic, said “We have a short window of opportunity to make a success out of isolation, quarantine under social distancing and lockdown and not to overwhelm critical care facilities in the hospitals,” she explained.

Project Stay I is a step up model. Those with mild symptoms and asymptomatic COVID-affected persons can be put up in hotel rooms and isolation rooms. Those who need advance treatment will then be shifted to COVID hospitals. The consortium model has to be expanded to cover the entire country, she said.

Ms. Reddy and Ms. Shaw said that the Central and State governments and ICMR have been extremely proactive and this coming together of government and private sector was in true spirit of public-private partnership.

Ms Shaw said they were working to enhance testing facility and the government has allowed private institutions for testing and for hospital care too. Some companies have come forward to make low cost testing kits, ventilators and protective gear for those working in the front line like health care and other essential services.

About her company’s role in the initiative, Ms Shaw said they were willing to provide free testing and support the testing cost for the needy.

Housing healthcare staff

She also suggested that the isolation rooms being provided by private sector should also be used to house the doctors and healthcare staff treating COVID-19 patients to protect the families of healthcare personnel. The more the isolation, less will be the chance of transmission of virus during the 21-day lockdown to quarantine and segregate the population.

Ms Reddy said they were working to provide separate facility for heathcare personnel and added that regular critical care facilities would be kept separate from COVID hospitals.