Pratishruti cancer and Palliative trust, a Dibrugarh based NGO in association with Dhemaji police superintendent Dr Dhananjay Ghanawat, carried out a telemedicine and video monitoring operation for home quarantined people in the Assam’s Dhemaji district for COVID-19.
Altogether, 140 volunteers including doctors, professors, PHD fellows, teachers, students from various institutes were associated with the pilot project.
Talking to Northeast Now, Dr Gayatri Gogoi, director of Pratishruti cancer and Palliative trust said, “We have successfully done telemedicine and video monitoring operation at Dhemaji district in the first phase of lockdown period. We have submitted the initial report to chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal and health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.”
Gogoi said, “Their main objective is to control community transmission of coronavirus, a distance mode operation model for monitoring the most quarantined individuals through telemedicine and audio and video calling is being conducted by the volunteers of our organisation. We have done a rapid symptom assessment on 17 persons those who have the symptom and done test and all of the test were found negative.”
She said, “In Dhemaji district we have collected the data of 2254 people who were kept under home quarantined and we have reached out 1610 person’s and other 744 person’s could be reach out due no contact number, wrong number and switch off etc. We have informed the local leaders of Dhemaji and police which we have not contacted due to various reasons.”
“During the five days of our project we known that no positive Covid-19 cases were found in Dhemaji district because no international and Nizamuddin Markaz connection. It’s a pilot project and we are successful in our attempt,” she added.
Dhemaji MLA Dr Ranuj Pegu and Jonai MLA Bhuban Pegu also associated with this attempt and help the home quarantined people by supplying essential commodities to them.
However, Dr Gayatri Gogoi said this was a new experience for them and they have learnt a lot from project.
She said the government should more careful in the red and orange zone area because they are working with a skeleton staff and it is very tough for a Asha worker because of her lack of knowledge on home quarantine.
“The periphery worker do no have knowledge and they have to look on other health issues and they are the person’s who can easily get infected.The numbers of staff are very less and we have to work without exposing them to the infected person’s. So, we have to use the technology by not getting contact with infected person,” Dr Gogoi said.