Bhubaneswar: The outgoing calls at the 1929, the 24X7 Covid Call Centre set up in the State capital to provide all kinds of Covid related support has crossed the 1 lakh mark.
Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has opened the Bhubaneswar Operations Centre (BOC) of the Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) office, and has made 1,06,326 outgoing calls, so far. The centre has also received over 88,000 calls till yesterday, official sources in the BMC said.
While the outgoing calls mainly consisted of the calls to home isolation patients to know their health-care status, the calls also included 2,312 outgoing calls to Red Flag patients. The idea behind categorizing home isolation patients into Red Flag and Green Flag cases is to monitor moderately ill and patients with mild Covid symptoms. Each Red Flag patient gets a call from the call centre for three consecutive days along with frequent RRT visits to his/her homes.
Besides caring for the Covid affected people across the Temple City, the 1929 call centre executives are currently checking the vaccination status of the frontline health workers.
The call centre executives till yesterday night have called 6,844 frontline health workers. The beneficiaries are asked regarding the status of the vaccine they have taken, how many doses and where etc, the source said.
The call centre executives also helped 28,962 callers in having doctor’s consultation as many were seeking medical advice from the team of 19 doctors, who are available in different groups in three different shifts.
Similarly, the centre has received 88,658 incoming calls, which are generally request for hospital shifting, visits of rapid response teams (RRTs) to home isolation patients, getting discharge certificates after home isolation period is over, information on testing, vaccination, slots, vaccination of the elderly and differently-abled, students planning to go to foreign countries for higher study, death certificates, paid home isolation facilities, travel related protocols and areas and also cremation related queries.
It can be noted here that by May 20, while the call centre had handled 50,414 outgoing calls to home isolation patients in order to keep track of their health status, it received 51,351 incoming calls from the Covid affected and related persons.
Apart from the doctors, 48 executives are working in three shifts in different groups to handle both the incoming and outgoing calls at the facility, which functions at the BOC of the Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited’s office in BMC-Bhawani Mall, Saheed Nagar here. The executives are working under the guidance of six supervising officials of BSCL.
While the first shift of the centre starts at 6 am and goes up to 2 pm, the second shift is scheduled between 2 pm and 10 pm and the third one between 10 pm and 6 am the next morning.
The calls are managed through 35 work stations. While 15 are used for receiving incoming calls and 5 for outgoing ones, 8 are used by doctors to give consultation. In addition to this, several workstations have been specifically arranged to take the registration bookings for vaccination and testing of 60+ age groups, to register students planning to go abroad with vaccination, doorstep RT-PCR testing for a senior citizen and helping senior citizens to be picked-up and dropped following vaccination at nearby centre close to their localities.