The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID19 as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 and as mitigation measures, countries adopted different strategies to control the spread, including social distancing and strict lockdown measures [1]. The republic of India went into a strict nationwide lockdown on 24 March 2020. This was expected to deaccelerate the spread of the virus in the country but had expected collateral damage which included limited access for people with common ailments and psychological stress [2]. In any disaster, the first responders are always a member of the local community and COVID19 was no different. Here we share the experience of how a group of doctors came together to provide voluntary service to the public through phone and online consults to contribute to alleviating the suffering of the population amidst the pandemic.

References

1. Coronavirus (COVID-19) Events as They Happen.
2. Dore Bhavya. “Covid-19: Collateral Damage of Lockdown in India”. The BMJ 369 (2020).
3. Kim Erin J., et al. “Motivations and Barriers Associated with Physician Volunteerism for an International Telemedicine Organization”. Frontiers in Public Health 7 (2019).
4. Lurie Nicole and Brendan G Carr. “The Role of Telehealth in the Medical Response to Disasters”. JAMA Internal Medicine 6 (2018): 745-746.
5. Reddy Indla., et al. “Violence against Doctors: A Viral Epidemic?”. Indian Journal of Psychiatry 10 (2019): S782-785.

Citation

Citation: Ankur Rakesh and Shubhank Singh. “Relief Helpline by Voluntary Doctors in the Times of COVID19". Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.9 (2020): 36-37.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Ankur Rakesh and Shubhank Singh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.