Mumbai: With security emerging as the main issue for resident doctors, the civic administration plans to give a high-tech touch to the control rooms in its hospitals.
While the four medical schools—KEM in Parel, LTMG in Sion, Nair in Mumbai Central, and Cooper Hospital in Juhu —already have control rooms with roughly 450 CCTVs in each of these hospitals, BMC wants to increase the storage capacity so that each can function like a replica of the civic central disaster control room.
In smaller hospitals, it plans to increase the number of CCTVs and/or set up high-tech control rooms.
A senior BMC official said work on setting up these control rooms at many of the hospitals has already begun. “Planned to be a replica of the central control room, this would have CCTV access to all the cameras set up across the hospital, hotline numbers to the police, fire brigade, the central disaster control room at the civic headquarters, and a public address system,” said the official.
In case of a mass casualty, the control room staff would be expected to get details about the patients being admitted, their condition, and update the central control room. A BMC officer said, at present, it becomes very difficult for them to get the doctors working in the casualty to provide this information at short notice.
However, one of the major challenges before the authorities for setting up these control rooms has been adequate space near the cabin of the dean or the medical superintendent. “The minimum space required by these control rooms is 300 square feet. It’s not easy to get such a space in our existing hospitals,” he said.
In the medical colleges, there are multiple control rooms as the campuses are widespread. Sion Hospital has three control rooms while Cooper Hospital has two. KEM Hospital has a big control room located in the hospital building.
Parts of Nair Hospital are under renovation and it’s the only teaching hospital where the control room is coming up right next to the dean’s cabin. In the BMC administrative setup, every ward office has a CCTV control room located right next to the ward officer’s office.
Meanwhile, the deans and medical superintendents, along with their security department, are in the process of working out critical areas that may need new CCTV cameras or extra lighting.