scorecardresearch
Monday, March 25, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomeHealthHow this IAS officer, a former Chicago risk analyst, is making Tirunelveli...

How this IAS officer, a former Chicago risk analyst, is making Tirunelveli oxygen-smart

District Collector Vishnu Venugopal says Indian bureaucracy is like a ‘black box’, but can transform lives. Villagers have named a hamlet after him in gratitude for his work.

Follow Us :
Text Size:

Tirunelveli: District Collector Vishnu Venugopal seems to have a looming crisis at hand Sunday, when Tirunelveli only has three tonnes of oxygen left — enough to last till 1 am. But that’s when the 35-year-old IAS officer’s past work as a risk analyst with British insurance giant Aon’s Chicago office comes in handy.

Venugopal’s hands-on live oxygen tracking and dashboarding of the Covid situation has made Tirunelveli the district with the lowest per capita oxygen consumption in the state of Tamil Nadu, even though it has a high Covid case load — as on 18 May the number of active cases in the district was pegged at 6,528.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems — Venugopal spends most evenings devising ways to make the oxygen supply last till replenishments arrive the next day.

On this day, with just four hours left for the oxygen stocks to run out, the civil servant gets on a call with anaesthesiologists deployed in the 920 oxygen bed-capacity Tirunelveli Medical College, the largest Covid facility in the district, to chalk out a plan to last the night.

The Covid screening and care centre building at the Tirunelveli Medical College | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint
The Covid screening and care centre building at the Tirunelveli Medical College | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

Oxygen cylinders are brought into the wards late at night to replace the depleting liquid oxygen tank’s supply lines, and calls are made to nearby districts and additional oxygen cylinders are arranged from the nearby district of Thoothukudi.

“We are surviving on an hour-to-hour plan, with limited oxygen and increasing Covid cases. Nights are the most challenging; that is the time when most patient distress calls pop up and the oxygen requirement shoots up,” engineer-turned-IAS officer Venugopal tells ThePrint.


Also read: To avoid ‘Delhi-like’ crisis, Tamil Nadu’s ‘oxygen war room’ is working 24×7 to ensure supply


Oxygen optimisation 

The mantra for Venugopal’s model of governance amid the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is oxygen use optimisation. To reduce oxygen consumption in the district, the DC has, with the help of doctors, devised a three-pronged strategy.

“A month back, when cases started increasing, we assigned 30 nurses to only monitor the oxygen flow in patients. Our oxygen consumption was high the first two days, after which the nurses figured out the right amount of oxygen flow that should be maintained. Our oxygen consumption has dropped to 5.8 kilo litres a day, and we have maintained it,” Venugopal told ThePrint.

Tirunelveli receives 0.3 kilolitres of oxygen from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Propulsion Complex located in the district, while the Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation supplies varying amounts of liquid oxygen according to availability.

The ‘oxygen’ nurses, working in two shifts between 5 pm and 5 am, monitor its consumption by patients. Their job is to check the pulse oximetry of patients and maintain it to the lowest level required. Since oxygen is addictive when given in any amount, these nurses counsel patients and help recovering patients with demasking — the process of weaning them off oxygen masks.

Dr K. Shantaraman, vice-principal of the Tirunelveli Medical College, explained the optimisation of the oxygen and dynamic pooling of oxygen beds by saying: “The treatment is not about giving patients volume of oxygen, but getting the inflammation down. Oxygen wastage is a common problem that hospitals are facing; we give optimal amounts of oxygen only to patients with 85-90 SPO2 levels.”

He added: “We are using non-rebreather masks for moderately ill patients; this has helped reduce oxygen wastage. Not only this, we have kept the oxygen supply available to all beds. This means non-oxygen beds can anytime be converted into oxygen beds as and when required.”

Additionally, postgraduate students of anaesthesia have been roped in to help with managing Covid patients’ care, and some of them are deployed to keep an eye on the oxygen equipment and its flow. They also keep a check on the patients who need to be taken off oxygen if they have stable SPO2 levels.

IAS officer with a hamlet named after him

Vishnu Venugopal comes from humble origins in Kochi, Kerala — his father, a guard with the railways, passed away when he was in Class 8, and mother Sheela became the sole breadwinner of the family.

The young Venugopal went on to graduate from the National Institute of Technology in Tiruchirappalli, and also has a degree certification in port management from Belgium, and was awarded the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship in 2019.

He worked as a financial risk analyst for Aon in Chicago in 2009-10, helping clients determine the level of risk involved in making a particular business decision.

Venugopal appeared for the civil service exam because he wanted to be actively involved in the nation-building process, and made it to the IAS in the 2011 batch.

He says while the Indian bureaucracy seems like a mysterious ‘black box’ from the outside, it has the power to transform lives, and he wants to use the reach of the system to bring transparency in governance.

Venugopal was promoted to the post of District Collector only five months back. Before that, he was a sub-collector, and his work was so appreciated that villagers renamed Vakaikulam, a hamlet where 45 families live, to Vishnu Nagar. They said this was their way of showing gratitude for “bringing light to their dark village”, as his initiatives literally brought electricity and water to their homes.

Now, as DC, Venugopal spends his afternoons speaking to doctors in the various blocks of Tirunelveli, having begun his day by inspecting Covid Care Centers and interacting with the public at 8 am. The barrage of calls usually ends at around 2 am, 18 hours later.


Also read: Why Chennai satellite & industry hub Chengalpattu is among TN’s worst-hit Covid districts


Command centre works from home

Unlike other Covid command centres across the country, the one in Tirunelveli stands empty. The person in charge, who did not wish to be named, said: “All our staff is working from home. We have a dashboard using which we communicate and do our tasks.”

Explaining the logic behind the move, the DC said: “These command centres can be potential super spreaders. In order to check that all the work is happening remotely, we have created a robust online system, with the help of which the team functions.”

 

Collector Vishnu Venugopal works on the district's Covid dashboard | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint
Collector Vishnu Venugopal works on the district’s Covid dashboard | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

One side of the dashboard, in Tamil, can be accessed by residents for Covid-related healthcare services. The administration’s side of the dashboard, meanwhile, features details of every Covid patient, downloaded from the ICMR website. The district’s Covid team makes regular calls to patients, and the collector says he listens in to 10 per cent of calls to check quality.

The district also started doing ‘testing swipes’ — camps were set up and a large number of people were tested to unearth Covid cases and prevent further spread. “As soon as we were able to identify the index case (the first documented case, which in this instance was a man working in Thoothukudi) in the month of April, we doubled our testing. Initially, our Covid numbers were very high, but that was because we eliminated Covid cases from the general populace early on with amped up testing,” Venugopal said.

A member of the nursing staff checks the oxygen levels of a patient at the Tirunelveli Medical College | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint
A member of the nursing staff checks the oxygen levels of a patient at the Tirunelveli Medical College | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

“In order to test more people, we doubled our testing capacity to 2,500 tests a day. Although private testing labs do contribute whatever little they can, the government facility pulls the maximum load. We have created three time slots throughout the day when the RT-PCR machines run at full capacity,” he added.

Safety of Kani tribe

Another challenge facing the IAS officer and his team is the safety of the Kani tribe that lives deep in Tirunelveli’s forests. It is the age-old administrative dilemma — should any kind of intervention be made into an area with no Covid cases, or leave the members of the tribe alone?

“Since they are far removed from civilisation, Covid has not reached them. We want it to remain that way; hence, no physical contact has been made with them,” said Venugopal.

He added that about 15-20 families of the tribe live deep in the forests, and even reaching them requires a 15-kilometre trek deep into unfamiliar parts of the jungles on the coast. Since there have been no cases in the area, he has chosen to not conduct a vaccination drive there.

“If at all they need anything, they reach out for help. All the tribal leaders have my phone number anyway,” Venugopal said.

(Edited by Shreyas Sharma)


Also read: Actor’s death fuels vaccine hesitancy in Tamil Nadu amid Covid surge, misinformation adds fire


 

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular