Ma Su walks out of fever awareness campaign. Here’s why

CHENNAI: Irked over poor arrangements and meagre participation of doctors and nurses in the fever awareness training programme organised at the Egmore Government hospital, State Health Minister Ma Subramanian walked out of the event and directed the authorities to reorganise the event in a massive scale.

“I wanted the event to be attended by 4,000 to 5,000 participants through online and offline mode so that the fever protocol is discussed among private and government hospital doctors, but hardly around 70 medicos attended the event,” Subramanian told DT Next.

The State Health Department has been organising 1,000 fever camps across Tamil Nadu, including 100 in Chennai as the cases of fever, influenza and dengue were increasing. In order to control the spread and identify the cases of fever at the earliest, the health department announced fever camps. As a large number of healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses, and other assistant staff are required and the symptoms of the three illnesses remain common, the awareness training camps were planned.

The objective of the event was to spread awareness on the types of fever among doctors, nurses and healthcare workers. The event was expected to be attended by 1,000 healthcare workers offline in Egmore at the training center. Meanwhile, as per the instructions of the health minister, the awareness training was to be made a statewide programme with a participation of about 3,000-4,000 healthcare workers and professionals from government and private sector through online medium over zoom.

However, there were less than 100 people at the event being organised on Monday as only about 30-40 nurses and other doctors were present at the event and arrangements were not made for online training. The Health Minister questioned the incomplete arrangements and told the concerned officials to postpone the training programme and make adequate large scale arrangements for the state-wide programme, as he walked out of the event on Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, sources say that since the number of fever cases escalated quickly, the health department officials found it difficult to implement the fever camps as announced by the minister and the training of the healthcare staff did not witness high number of participants.