The recent years have witnessed the catastrophic conditions that COVID-19 brought across the world. Needless to say that India was one of the worst-hit countries by the pandemic last year. Every hospital, big and small, was overwhelmed by working beyond its human resources and infrastructure capacity. While the focus remained on the adequacy of hospitals in cities, we realized many rural areas lacked the required hospital facilities to tackle COVID-19 and thousands of patients travelled to the cities seeking medical care by putting themselves at risk. These challenging circumstancse put significant pressure on the healthcare system to provide local health facilities.
Looking at a specific case in Telangana, we learned that a few districts were overwhelmed by the rise in COVID-19 cases and needed help with additional medical facilities. There was a need for extra ICU beds in many areas, and it was imperative to ramp up the critical healthcare infrastructure.
To address this challenge, Virtusa joined hands with the United Way of Hyderabad to launch a mission for upgrading infrastructure by constructing a thirty-bed hospital in PHC Mota Kondur premises.
Through this collaboration, our concern was to achieve the following objectives in a continuous race against time:
Virtusa and United Way of Hyderabad signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) dated March 30th, 2021. We began the construction of the upcoming thirty-bed hospital at the Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district headquarters, Bhuvanagiri town. The hospital will serve a population of 26,000 locals of Mota Kondur Mandal from twenty Gram Panchayats (local village councils) and ten hamlets.
As of the 2011 Census, the district has a population of 726,465. The existing Primary Health Centre (PHC) building was swamped due to the spike in COVID-19 cases, with just six beds and a limited number of medical attendants. Apart from this, there continues to be a daily flux of 200+ floating outpatients coming to PHC for treatment from said areas. There are no separate rooms to treat/isolate COVID-19 patients, and there was a dire need to upgrade infrastructure.
We are immensely grateful to share that the collaborative effort of Virtusa and United Way of Hyderabad will pay off as we are all set to inaugurate the hospital in June 2022. With our constant presence in the area last year, while constructing the hospital, we had a better understanding of the healthcare challenges faced by the locals. This has helped us expand our medical functionalities in the hospital, enabling us to serve as a pivotal hospital in the region potentially.
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