Covid help is just a call away in Andhra Pradesh

Vijayawada: The 104 Covid call centre helps people get Coronavirus treatment and facilitates tele-consultations in the 13 districts of the state. As many 5,267 doctors are on the network of the 104 Tele Consultation centre. They include 1,017 specialist doctors.

The call centre came in handy during the Covid second wave to address health issues related to the Coronavirus.

According to officials, a unit of it was set up on April 16 at HCL campus, Gannavaram, and on May 13 another was set up at APIIC Building, Mangalagiri, to take appropriate measures to handle the evolving situation in the state that yielded good results.

As per the state details disclosed by the Covid command control centre 1,389 calls were attended by the call centre from Monday 4 pm to Tuesday 4 pm by 333 staff including 27 doctors working in 3 shifts at both HCL and APIIC campuses. The calls include 125 test results, 5 registrations, 165 vaccine calls, 4 CVC location calls, 191 Covid test calls, 798 Covid information calls and 101 hospital admission calls.

In all, a total of 5,15,982 calls were processed by the call centre since April 1. It includes 71,523 calls for test results, 2,774 for registrations, 27,146 for vaccine, 2,941 for CVC location, 1,05,814 for Covid tests, 2,10,372 for Covid information and 93,412 for the hospital admissions.

Doctors were hired to conduct remote tele consultation and evaluate 104 callers for Covid-19 symptoms, to do virtual triaging and provide advice on the further course of action such as testing, medical advice with or without prescription and hospital admission etc.

Training was provided on Covid 19 protocols to all doctors and the 104 Tele Consultation mobile application was also provided to all the doctors.

A total of 18,563 patients spoke to the doctors through the tele consultation under various categories up to 4 pm on June 21 and cumulatively 8,20,051 calls were made to patients so far since May 1.