Take care of diabetic staff in times of Covid-19 pandemic: Dr Bipin Sethi

Business leaders and CHROs take note. While the world along with India is still battling the novel coronavirus pandemic, it is very important for companies to ensure health and safety of the workforce so that they can bounce back after the resultant economic recession, experts claim.

According to endocrinologist Dr Bipin Kumar Sethi, employers and employees should take steps to ensure that diabetics, given that they are more suseptible to infections, take proper care during the lockdown period whether they are working from home or continue to work at a manufacturing unit or factory. The endocrinologist has advised that diabetics should utilise this time to rejuvenate, introspect, learn new things and be in an optimistic mindset.

“Although we are all learning newer things about the pandemic each day, there is need to circumspect and prepare ourselves to tackle the issues rather than panic.Trust and update information only from authentic health care bodies like ICMR/Health Ministry rather than social media and do what they mandate,” he said.

A report, named National Diabetes and Diabetic Retinopathy Survey, released by the health and welfare ministry last year showed that the country showed a prevalence od diabetes at 11.8% for the last four years. In fact, the report shows that there are a total of 72.96 million cases of diabetes in the adult population in India. While urban India shows a range of 10.9% To 14.2%, cases in rural India range between 3% and 7.8%.

According to Sethi, employers and employees should ensure that their strict diet regime and disciplined routine is not disrupted. He added that diabetics should start planning and implementing indoor exercises.

The country recently also has seen a good measure of panic buying in terms of medicines as well and Dr Sethi advised that diabetics should not skip their prescribed dosage but look for alternative drugs from their doctors, more so, if they are on insulin.

Dr Sethi also suggested that in such times, diabetics should monitor their glucose levels more regularly and should get renal, retina and lipids checkup done once the lockdown is over.

As a general advisory, the endocrinologist suggests that employees should maintain social distancing to as much as possible along with being hygenic. He also urged doctors to offer advice via any medium of communication free of charge.

[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]Advisory for diabetics:

• Take diet as per norm. Take nutritious balanced food on time.
• Do/Start indoor exercises
• Do not skip or hoard drugs, look and ask for substitutes rather than stop especially insulin
• Continue to or start monitoring blood glucose regularly, more so if there is any sickness and later when lock down opens get lipids,renal functions and eye check ups done too
• Contact doctors, your own or others in case of ANY doubt
• Consider vaccinations for pneumonia,hepatitis and flu sooner or/than later
• Continue to use  ACE-inhibitors or ARBs (the tablets ending with or having suffix -pril/ -sartan) for blood pressure
• Buy (if you do not have one )as soon as you get the chance a glucometer and BP instrument[/box]