As part of Campus Four Plus, a long-term and intensive programme in Medical College hospitals to check infectious diseases before their outbreak, house surgeons and junior doctors are being taken through a training programme to create a safer hospital environment.
Titled 'Our Hospital, Our Lives,' the training programme will give an orientation to junior doctors on how best to handle infectious diseases inside hospital wards so that the risk of disease transmission is reduced.
“Last year, a major outbreak of dengue occurred in the Medical College area. Of the 100 or more cases reported, 77 cases were from within the campus. Most of those affected were house surgeons. Apart from the control measures being adopted inside the campus, house surgeons too need to be updated on the strategies to be adopted to reduce transmission risk inside wards,” a senior health official said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Timely reporting of acute fever cases and placing all dengue patients inside mosquito nets are some of the strategies being adopted. Preparedness, awareness, risk assessment and response are the concepts being propagated as part of the Campus Four Plus strategy.
The Medical College campus will adopt separate strategies for infectious diseases prevention as the campus is vast and houses several medical institutions, eateries and wayside sellers, making it difficult to pinpoint the responsibility of campus cleaning on one person or institution. Also, there are several old buildings, ponds, unused water tanks and broken drains in the campus which could all be potential sites for vector breeding. Construction works are also going on and these sites are a major risk factor for dengue outbreaks as there would be water stagnation on the site which could facilitate mosquito breeding. This was expected to be the cause of last year's dengue outbreak in the campus.
As part of implementing the Four Plus strategy, the 136-acre campus is now divided into 22 zones, with a nodal officer for each zone, who will be responsible for keeping the area under his jurisdiction clean and for ensuring that there are no opportunities for vector breeding there.
ADVERTISEMENT
Several of these zones are clubbed to form eight major territories and a person from the Community Medicine Department is supervising the activities in each territory. “We have completed the first round of cleaning before the rains and review meeting are being held regularly. There are several autonomous institutions and commercial buildings inside the campus and the head of each institution has been made accountable for keeping their premises clean. There are a lot of tender coconut sellers on the campus and the coconut shells are a concern now,” one of the nodal officers at MCH said.
Regular orientation meetings are also being conducted now for para-medical staff, cleaners and all categories of employees separately.