An increased demand for homecare and nursing assistance has left many Covid patients in Calcutta who are getting discharged from hospital without help even as family members are desperately calling up homecare service providers.

Several such agencies who provide trained nurses and attendants for patients said the demand had gone up by more than 20 per cent in the past couple of weeks. Most of them are attributing it to a rise in the number of non-Covid cases.

A 70-year-old woman in Kasba was treated at a private hospital off EM Bypass with Covid for 10 days. On Wednesday, she was discharged after doctors found her condition stable. However, she is extremely weak and is unable to even go to the washroom and needs assistance for eating.

“For two days we have been calling up homecare and local centres which provide untrained assistants. The centres said they could not provide one for a Covid patient who has not tested negative, while professional homecare centres said they would not be able to provide an assistant before a couple of days,” said a relative of the woman.

The problem is mostly with elderly people who were admitted to hospital with moderate to severe symptoms of Covid and need professional assistance at home.

“We are getting many calls from family members of both Covid and non-Covid patients, but the demand has gone up so much in the last few weeks that in most cases we are needing one to two days to provide a caregiver,” said Kalpataru Banerjee, a general physician with Buurtzorg India, a Netherlands-based agency providing nursing care at home.

The agency has about 40 nurses and attendants in Calcutta. On Thursday evening, there was just one male attendant available, said Banerjee. He said the demand had gone up because many non-Covid patients are now undergoing surgeries and procedures and are requiring assistance and nursing care at home.

Covid patients, he said, mostly need assistance, rather than clinical care, because of extreme weakness. However, some with comorbidities need clinical care, too.

Apollo Home Healthcare has about 120 nurses at its Calcutta unit. On Thursday, all were engaged.

“We had to refuse several people who called us to hire a nurse,” said Souvik Bhattacharya, the unit head of Apollo Home Healthcare,

Calcutta. Bhattacharya said one main reason for the shortage was that trained nurses usually did not want to join such agencies where career options are limited.

“Most nurses who have the ANM (Auxiliary Nursing Midwifery) and GNM (General Nursing and Midwifery) degrees prefer to join hospitals because the career prospects there are better. Only a few join homecare agencies because they are offered more money,” said Bhattacharya.

So, there is always a shortage of nurses for homecare and the high demand during the Covid pandemic has only aggravated the crisis.

Nabarun Saha of Portea Home and Healthcare Service said in the last 15 days the demand had gone up significantly for nurses and attendants. Till last month, the agency would get new demand for nurses and attendants every alternate day. Now, every day they get two or three new requests.

Also, before the pandemic, private hospitals would provide nurses to take care of critical patients at home after discharge. That has stopped now because of a shortage of nurses.

“We are facing an acute shortage of nurses because many have recently joined government hospitals, while some have been assigned to Covid wards,” said the CEO of a private hospital.