NEW DELHI: As Delhi continues to grapple with the raging dengue crisis that has claimed 37 lives so far, 14 doctors have been served show cause notices after they were found “sleeping or loitering” during duty hours.
The notices for dereliction of duty were issued after Delhi’s Health Minister Satyendar Jain and some senior officials made surprise visits to government hospitals at odd hours following the worst outbreak of the vector-borne disease in six years.
“The Health Minister, Satyendar Jain, visited the hospitals between 11.45 PM and 6 AM to check their preparedness in terms of dealing with the dengue patients and found some doctors sleeping while being on duty, while some were found loitering in other wards when they should have been at a particular ward,” a health department official said.
“Fourteen doctors from seven hospitals have been issued show cause notices in this context,” he said, adding some staff nurses also have been issued such notices.
The department is now awaiting response to the notices before it considers whether to take action against them.
The hospitals whose doctors have been served notices include Aruna Asaf Ali, Deep Chand Bandhu, Babu Jagjivan Ram, Acharya Shree Bhikshu, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, Sanjay Gandhi Memorial and Baba Saheb Ambedkar.
Meanwhile, to accommodate the rising number of dengue patients in the national capital, the health department has procured 400 new beds which are likely to be placed in Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Hospital, Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital and Ambedkar Hospital, which have been dealing with a huge rush of patients.
According to the civic authorities, the official death toll from dengue is 25, while hospitals have reported 37 deaths so far.
With 6,486 cases of dengue recorded thus far, 2015 has exceeded 6259 cases reported in 2010.
According to doctors, the vector-borne disease will persist till November before declining and fading away. They, however, apprehended it may flare up if it rains.
They, however, asked people not to panic saying as 99 per cent of dengue cases were “preventable and manageable at home and do not require admission”.
Recently, the New Delhi Municipal Council had issued notices to Sanskriti School and AIIMS after it found dengue mosquitoes breeding in their premises.
The action against Sanskriti School in Chanakyapuri area came two days after a 16-year-old student of the school died due to medical complications caused by dengue.
The civic body has, meanwhile, issued yet another notice to the director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to clear the aedes mosquito breeding spots from its campus at the earliest failing which the NDMC will remove them and impose a fine on the institute.
NDMC has issued 248 challans so far with dengue outbreak calling into question the role of civic bodies in containing the deadly disease.
Besides 90 notices to the sprawling Presidential Estate, the council has issued challans to four hospitals including AIIMS and Safdarjung, various government offices and a school here for being a dengue mosquito breeding ground.
The Ministries of Finance and Home Affairs, Bihar Bhawan, Sikkim Bhawan and Uttarakhand Bhawan were issued notices by the NDMC for mosquitogenic conditions on their premises.
The council staff had also detected mosquito-breeding conditions in five embassies including that of Ghana, Singapore, Malaysia, Ethiopia and the Czech Republic, but no challans have been issued to them as the civic-body doesn’t have an authority to do so.
Dengue, a vector-borne disease, is transmitted by several species of mosquito within the genus Aedes. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle and joint pains, and a characteristic skin rash that is similar to measles.
Doctors say since the treatment is symptomatic with no specific cure, indiscriminate use of painkillers could cause patients to become resistant to these.-PTI
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