State home secretary Alapan<\/a> Bandopadhyay, also Kolkata\u2019s nodal officer for Covid, held a meeting with senior KMC<\/a>, police and health department officers on Tuesday and decided to augment the number of ambulances in the city to facilitate easy transport of patients. Abhijit Chowdhury, a member of the state\u2019s Covid expert panel, also attended the meeting, where several decisions were taken. <\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAccording to what was decided, private hospitals and nursing homes will be asked to contact either the health department or the KMC health department to make arrangements for ambulances to transfer Covid suspects or positive patients so that private agencies running ambulance services can\u2019t fleece the patients\u2019 families, as have allegedly been going on.
Bandopadhyay on Tuesday took stock of city\u2019s ambulance fleet for Covid-positive patients. Later, the state home secretary said though both the state health department and the KMC were in the process of adding to the fleet, there was no reason for patients to panic. \u201cWe now have a fair number of ambulances and there is no need for panic. It is true that from time to time, we need to augment the fleet, but that does not mean Covid patients will have to pay exorbitant fares for the services to private agencies in times of need,\u201d he said. The state home secretary pointed out that while the state health department had a fleet of 110-115 ambulances, the KMC was steadily adding more vehicles. \u201cThe state and the KMC together have around 145 ambulances for the city that can be used for transporting serious Covid-positive patients to hospitals and those with mild symptoms to safe houses,\u201d he said.
According to a KMC health official, the civic body\u2019s ambulances have GPS. . \u201c We need to track their movements to ensure the ferrying of no Covid patient<\/a> is delayed. We are augmenting our fleet by temporarily taking back ambulances from clubs and NGOs, which were given those vehicles under MP or MLA LAD schemes,\u201d the official said. <\/div>\n