March 28, 2024, 3:06 pm


ALIF

Published:
2020-08-17 19:04:42 BdST

Move afoot to consider treatment at Covid-19 hospitals as free of cost


The government is considering treating all treatments provided to the patients at dedicated Covid-19 hospitals for around four months as free of cost, sources said.

To this effect, a proposal is now under scrutiny at the finance ministry.

Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) has sent the proposal to Health Service Division to take required steps to avoid any future audit objections and other complexities in this regard, they added.

"We have received a proposal from health service division. Now we are looking into the matter," a finance division official said.

From March 2020, the government started providing treatment to Covid-19-infected patients on an emergency basis through several hospitals by fixing dedicated Covid hospitals.

Considering the emergency situation, the dedicated-hospital authorities did not take treatment costs including ticket and admission fee, ECG, X-ray and different pathological tests from the coronavirus-infected patients.

In such circumstances, DGHS formed a committee and a meeting was held on June 23 last.

The meeting decided to request the finance division, seeking consent about the previous free-of-cost treatment of Covid-19 patients mentioning the period from March 08 to July 13 last to avoid any audit objections in future, according to the department.

From July 13, the government issued an instruction for receiving ticket and admission fee, ECG, X-ray and different pathological tests cost from Covid-19-infected patients, according to DGHS document.

Currently, there are 22 dedicated Covid-19 hospitals in Dhaka metropolitan area, one in Keraniganj, two in Narayanganj, one in Gazipur and 09 in Chattogram, according to a deputy secretary of health service division.

The state-run DGHS showed that out of 15,255 general beds in such hospitals, only 4,385 of care facilities were occupied by coronavirus patients as of August 16 across the country.

In terms of ICU (intensive care unit), 219 beds remained unused out of 543 for not getting any patients.

When contacted, Director (Hospital) Dr Md Farid Hossain Miah said DGHS sent a proposal to health service division to forward it to the finance ministry regarding previous treatment cost of dedicated Covid-19 public hospitals.

The overall tally of confirmed cases rose to 276,549 in the country. A total of 158,950 patients have already recovered while 3,657 others died from the highly-infectious viral disease to date, the health directorate said in a statement.

Globally, more than 21,649,672 people were infected with the novel coronavirus and 769,610 died until 7.23 pm on Sunday, according to the data from Worldometer that tracks the infections from new pathogen.

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