Healthcare Leader: Dr Alexander Thomas
President, Association of Healthcare Providers – India (AHPI)
The COVID-19 pandemic has become a major global threat globally which has impacted the economies and livelihood of people. The private hospitals in India played a huge role in tackling the virus while stepping up operations to complement and enhance the efforts of the government. Many private hospitals allotted extra beds
and additional manpower, set up isolation wards, brought in new equipment, set up the desired inventory and converted their premises into COVID care and hybrid facilities, to ensure that other medical emergency needs are not compromised.
Though a lot of initiatives have been undertaken by the private hospitals, poor patient footfall and postponement of elective procedures have led to reduced financial inflow to about 30 per cent. As a fallout, hospitals in many instances were unable to pay salaries to their employees, found it difficult to meet the EMI requirements and annual maintenance contracts.
Reduced manpower has made hospitals rethink to focus on multitasking as well as to explore new technological solutions to improve
the efficiency and enable staff to operate safely
Private hospitals were functioning with 20 to 30 per cent of the capacity. Postponement of elective surgeries, dip
in footfalls, reduction in OPD patients, complete halt on international patients due to travel ban and a significant fall in bed occupancy and inpatient treatments have had an impact on the revenues significantly. Besides increased input costs resulted in huge losses across hospitals.
Healthcare workers faced challenging times directly catering to COVID-19 patients. They are overworked, which makes them vulnerable to errors and possibly increases their risk of getting infected. Compounding this is the fear and mental exhaustion from overwork, death of patients, colleagues falling ill or dying from the infection, and
their safety. Also, healthcare workers got separated from their family members for a long time as many opted not to visit their homes fearing infection risk to their families. All these took a heavy toll on them. Hospitals have adopted new working mechanisms during COVID times. Practising social distancing at work, communicating
through phone calls, instant messaging, conference calls and emails have become the new norm. Cross-functional task forces are formed. Reduced manpower has made hospitals rethink to focus on multitasking
as well as to explore new technological solutions to improve the efficiency and enable staff to operate safely.
Ever since the threat of COVID-19 crippled our country, AHPI has been at the forefront working closely with the central and state government in preparing and implementing ways to tackle the crisis. AHPI worked with
the governments, and this has led to many suggestions offered by AHPI being accepted and implemented. The members of AHPI continue to hold regular meetings with all state chapter office bearers as together we face this unprecedented challenge.