Home

Group of Durban doctors offer home-based care to COVID-19 patients

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A group of Durban based doctors are offering their services to manage COVID-19 patients within the confines of their homes – provided that they are on a medical aid.

The COVID Home Management Team Durban, as the initiative is known, was started by Dr Naseeba Kathrada this week.

After seeing the growing number of cases in the country, Kathrada thought of a way to assist the healthcare system, which could soon become overwhelmed.

Interested patients will have to be referred to the team by a general practitioner.

Kathrada says they are still in the process of recruiting more specialists in order to service more households should the need arise.

“With the COVID-19 pandemic, the one thing that is most certain is uncertainty and as new studies are being done, new management protocols are being done. We trying to pull all the resources and give the doctors good guidelines on how to manage the patients at home.”

“This would not be beneficial to the patients but all the other patients that are in hospital and the patient that can be managed at home would not put themselves at risk.”

In the video below, is a discussion on South Africa’s public health system:

Eastern Cape and Gauteng healthcare systems are already taking strain as COVID-19 infections surge.

The Eastern Cape has now requested the national government to deploy the military’s medical team to the province.

Contributor to Gauteng’s Provincial Coronavirus Command Council Professor Steve Moeng has said that health workers are feeling the heat.

“We had found ourselves up to mid-April, being able to cope with only one ward. That one could deal with PUI’s and it could also deal with COVID-19 positive patients. In the past 10-14 days, what we have seen coming in, is that we have grown from that one ward to more than seven dedicated wards that are dedicated to PUI’s (Person Under Investigation) and COVID-19 positive cases. Every day you need to be able to sit down and look at the patients coming in and figure out the best way of being able to accommodate them on the field.”

Author

MOST READ