A territorial approach to manage home care health service provision.
The public and private network of health service providers agreed to pool financial resources and efforts to organize home care teams in each locality of the city to do epidemiological detection and prevention.
For this purpose, the following agreements were made:
- Home care is prioritized for patients infected with COVID19, to avoid congestion in health and emergency services and reduce the risk of contagion.
- The Secretary of Health and the city’s four health networks will organize the home delivery of medicines, in order to avoid patients with chronic conditions who rely on certain medications to go out to hospitals to pick them up.
Moreover, to address the increased demand on health care services the following measures were implemented:
- Set criteria for not scheduling elective procedures.
- Mobilize or transfer services.
- Increase the installed capacity of intensive care units (ICUs)
- Increase early discharges and home hospitalization programs.
- Limit visits to hospitalized patients (only one companion allowed per visit and reduced visiting hours)
In addition, work has been done to increase the number of hospital beds available. We have made joint efforts to adapt the space of all hospitals in the city. Also, we worked together with Corferias, the Bogota International Center for Business and Exhibitions, to adapt the place for sick patients of conditions not related to COVID-19, committing to putting in place 1,200 beds. This transitory hospital is already receiving patients with mild to intermediate conditions.
The city's Health Secretary has also been the main source in the implementation of Special Care Zones, hotspots of contagion where heavier lockdown measures are taking place.
The following activities are currently being carried out through the Special Care Zones:
- Pedagogic advice on self-care and contagion contention.
- Daily phone calls to people who may have been exposed to the virus through contact with carriers.
- Risk analysis of all the areas that may become contagion hotspots.
- Epidemiologic research in order to guarantee the traceability of contagion.
- Random testing of one person per household in the Special Care Zone.
- Vaccine verification for children under 5 years of age.
