A video of Bengaluru doctor making a passionate appeal to fellow doctors urging them to join him in treating COVID-19 patients at the HBS hospital in Shivajinagar has gone viral on social media.
The video that is captioned as ‘Doctors and Nursing Staff required immediately contact Dr. Shariq’ has a passionate appeal asking doctors to come together in fighting the novel coronavirus pandemic in the city of Bengaluru. When a media house contacted the hospital on Sunday, it required 48 doctors and had received calls from 5-6 doctors from the video appeal. In the video, Dr, Taha Mateen said,
“I speak from the ICU of the HBS hospital. It’s been a virtual bloodbath. I came in the morning at like 7:30 in the morning and its 12’o’clock midnight right now. Patients are continuously calling me now ‘cause their fathers are breathless, their brothers are breathless and they cannot find a room in Bengaluru and at this time if you see there is one Mr. Shiva and me. There is no other doctor willing to work in this hospital. I have beds, I have oxygen beds, I have ventilators, I have all the equipment. I have another 30 beds like this but I don’t have doctors working here. I find them on WhatsApp. I need 6 hours of your time in a day. Please this is my fervent request. This is the time to show we care. Sometimes the army is on the frontline, sometimes the fire people are on the frontline, sometimes the police are on the frontline. Right now, you and I, my fellow doctors, are in the frontline, let us show that we care for humanity.”
7,500 People Undergoing Treatment
There have been several instances in the city of Bengaluru where patients had to succumb to the disease because they couldn’t find a bed or a hospital which could admit them. As per the official figures of the government, there are over 7,500 people undergoing treatment in Bengaluru hospitals. Dr. Mehdi Kaleem, an organization volunteer in the HBS hospital said,
“We are looking for duty doctors, they can be just MBBS graduates or specialist doctors (intensivists) with experience in intensive care (IC). We are looking for doctors here who can incubate people to the ventilators for the intensivists. We are also trying to scale up to other facilities as well and for that, we need a lot of these doctors. Today we are in a situation where we are not getting doctors even though we are trying out to reach as much as we can. We are trying to look for doctors who are working both in the public and private set up.”
Source: The News Minute
