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KLUANG – The Health Ministry (MoH) has urged all employers in the country to accept digital copies of certificates of home surveillance and observation (HSO) orders and release orders (RO) to avoid congestion at Covid-19 assessment centres (CAC).
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said this was because many patients were coming to CACs as their employers declined to accept digital certificates and asked for written copies.
He said a report to the national Covid-19 quarantine and low-risk treatment centre found that 30% to 50% of cases at CACs were not for deteriorating health case assessments while undergoing home monitoring.
“As many as 90% were there to obtain written HSO notices. This causes an increase in the workload of MoH staff. They are supposed to make assessments for patients’ conditions instead of writing HSO notices.
“After the isolation period ends, patients need to make a copy of the HSO digital certificate screenshot for employers and relevant parties,” he said at a press conference at the Simpang Renggam health clinic CAC here today.
Khairy said that the public could lodge a complaint with MoH if their employers declined to accept their HSO or RO digital certificates.
On the virtual CAC, Khairy said that as of February 23, it had monitored 361,283 active cases at home by detecting deteriorating conditions of Covid-19 patients nationwide through a health assessment tool.
“We are not asking questions for fun. When they answer the questions, we have a system to look for warning signs. If the warning signs are worrying, we will ask them to be physically present at the CAC,” he said.
Therefore, he asked individuals who underwent isolation at home to answer questions on the MySejahtera app twice a day, as the average number of active cases who answered questions was only 55% even though MoH had set a target of at least 70%.
He said it was important for MoH to be able to detect high-risk cases that needed immediate treatment, thus reducing brought-in-dead cases.
He also said that from February 13 to 19, the number of isolation cases at home referred to low-risk treatment and quarantine centres was 0.4%, while those referred to hospitals were 0.2%. – Bernama, February 27, 2022