How Telangana is meeting oxygen demand

State takes series of measures addressed at ironing out logistical difficulties, augmenting storage and distribution capacity apart from ensuring judicious use of limited resources

Hyderabad: The demand for medical oxygen has shot through the roof across the country with the rapid surge of Covid cases. Due to the limited availability of medical oxygen and the need to ensure adequate supplies for patients, the State government has taken a series of measures addressed at ironing out logistical difficulties, augmenting storage and distribution capacity and also to ensure the judicious use of the limited resources.

To ensure rational use, the Health Department has instructed the heads of all government hospitals to be judicious and focus on preventing wastage. Healthcare workers in government hospitals who are directly involved in handling medical oxygen are being sensitised on the need to plug leakages, unnecessary use and avoiding wastage.

A concerted effort has been launched to ensure usage of oxygen at all private and government hospitals are audited. Senior health officials said the stress is on ensuring incidents like hospitals running out of medical oxygen in real-time, which has been the case in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai, does not occur in Hyderabad.

A senior IAS officer has been appointed as the point person to oversee and regulate the usage of medical oxygen in government and private hospitals. Apart from that, senior officials have also been made in-charge of tracking the availability of the medical oxygen at the district level across the State.

The Health Department has projected that Telangana might require anywhere between 500 Metric Tonnes (MTs) and 600 MTs of medical oxygen per day in the coming months. The Centre has allotted about 360 MT of medical oxygen, which is being transported to Telangana from steel industries in Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The State on its own can generate about 120 MTs of oxygen on a daily basis. Authorities expected transportation of about 100 MTs of oxygen from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu but the proposal was stalled for various reasons.

“A part of the oxygen that was allocated by the Centre for us could not arrive from certain States and there could be some short supply in the near future. However, at this particular stage, we are able to manage the situation. Our focus is to improve infrastructure related to medical oxygen in Telangana,” Director of Medical Education (DME), Dr K Ramesh Reddy had recently said while interacting with presspersons.