National Doctors’ Day 2021: Here’s What Govt Doing to Support Families of Doctors, Health Workers

When the COVID-19 virus struck the world last year, it caught most of the world unprepared and unleashed havoc. Millions of people lost their life. While the situation has been grim, to say the least, our doctors and medical start staff put their foot down and worked tirelessly to save precious human lives. When things got worse during the second wave of the pandemic and we saw the hospitals getting overburdened by the number of patients, it was still our medical support teams that were fighting the virus despite all the odds.

Long shifts, difficult working conditions, and the threat of catching the virus, our medical front line workers faced every challenge in their duty. While it’s true that we still lost many lives to the virus, we cannot even imagine the calamity that would have happened if our team of workers and medical staff had not worked the way they did. In their line of duty, many doctors also lost their lives while working to save others leaving behind a family with a void that might never be filled.

To support families of these doctors and health workers who lost life to COVID-19 virus, the government of India introduced the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package (PMGKP) Insurance Scheme in March 2020. While the scheme was initially introduced for only 90 days it was further extended multiple times to offer better support.

This scheme provided a personal accident cover of Rs 50 lakh to all the health workers who were put on COVID-19 duties and were at risk of the virus. This scheme aimed to provide compensation within a period of 48 hours of any fatality of a health worker because of the COVID-19.

In addition to the insurance program introduced by the Government of India, Delhi government had also announced a Rs 1 crore compensation for medical staff and other frontline workers in Delhi who lost their life during COVID-19 duty.

As per the data available till June 2, a total of 1,372 doctors lost their life during COVID-19 duty. In the second wave of the coronavirus cases 624 doctors had succumbed to the virus most of which belonged to Delhi. Total 109 doctors from the country’s capital had lost life in the second wave of coronavirus.

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