How must health officials conduct contact tracing when a person has tested positive for COVID-19? What is the correct and safest way to ferry a patient with the virus to the hospital?
These are questions all healthcare professionals are grappling with. To help create awareness and to ensure that the correct protocol is followed, the State government launched a YouTube channel — COVID-19 Training Task Force — on March 26.
The channel has around 1.46 lakh followers, including doctors, nurses, ASHAs and gram panchayat members. Over the next two days, the government plans to reach out to 60,000 people who are part of the village-level task force via the channel. Topics that will be addressed include social distancing and rules to follow during quarantine.
P.C. Jaffer, who is in charge of capacity building for COVID-19, said that a resource person conducts a live session and those attending the training online can post questions in the comments. “The trainees can also look up the videos online if they want to refer to a particular topic in case of any doubts,” he said. The duration of the videos ranges from three minutes to an hour. Some videos have close to 6,000 views so far.
Through specific videos, the channel is set to train 100 teams that include medical professionals handling primary contacts and 1,300 teams handling secondary contacts in Bengaluru.
K. Ravikumar, regional director, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, who conducted sessions for more than 1,200 GPs on Wednesday on the channel, said the advantage of online training is reaching a large number of people. He, however, admitted that during the sessions, the officials are unable to gauge the audience’s response. However, they are trying to get feedback through comments on the live videos.
A set of frequently asked questions is being developed in seven languages. Officials from the departments of Primary and Secondary Education, Higher Education, and Rural Development have been roped in for the project.
