Tirupati: SVIMS in forefront in fight against Coronavirus

Tirupati: SVIMS Sri Padmavati Medical College for Women (SPMC) has been in the forefront of dealing with novel coronavirus pandemic soon after the first Covid case was reported in the country. After the government announced the institute as the state Covid-19 hospital in early April, so far 13 positive cases are admitted in the hospital attached to SPMC.

Till April 11, 465 outpatients with suspicion of Covid-19 were screened and 153 swabs were taken for testing while 58 were admitted out of which 43 are tested negative and two reports are pending.

Now, all out-patient and inpatient services for Covid-19 cases are provided at this facility where all critical and severely critical patients referred by other districts are to be admitted. For this purpose, 320 non-ICU beds and 130 ICU beds are provided at SPMC hospital and this capacity can be extended further.

The hospital was provided with all required equipment like ventilators, defibrillators, ECG machines, BIPAP machines, and others by SVIMS and government. Besides, the state government has been providing breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks two times a day to the patients.

Explaining the readiness to manage the Covid-19 patients, the Director-cum -Vice Chancellor Dr B Vengamma told The Hans India that the entire faculty have affirmed their resolve to participate in the duties at the earliest opportunity.

Earlier, Professor and Head of Department of Medicine Dr Alladi Mohan espoused the importance of the social distancing, hand hygiene and other important things and presented the all available date to faculty, nursing and paramedical staff.

The Director further said that the VRD lab of SVIMS-SPMC is the first designated lab in the state to perform Covid-19 tests.

Due to this, the existing equipment at the lab has been expanded from two to four and performing 300 tests per day working 24 hours a day led by Dr Usha Kalawat.

They trained microbiologists at the new testing centres too. A total of 3,655 covid tests were conducted at the lab out of them 176 are positives.

A new out-patient wing in the clinical block was started with facilities to obtain throat and naspharyngeal swabs without spreading the contagion to decongest the earlier out-patient wing.

"We have started SMS campaign to all the registered patients at our institute on the steps to be taken to prevent the spread of virus. In fact it was started even before the voice message caller tunes appeared in the mobiles," said the Director.