India’s 1st health advice helpline flooded with calls

Nearly two months have passed since India’s first health advice call centre initiated under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) started taking calls at Pune’s Aundh Chest Hospital.

Yet the helpline, serving as a lifeline to health workers in rural areas giving them access to specialist’s advice, is yet to have a formal launch. Reason: ministers were unavailable for ribbon-cutting ceremony after the model code of conduct came into place for local body elections. The delay of the launch has also held up distribution of literature on the helpline amongst health workers.

However, refusing to deny access of services to people, the helpline 104 started functioning and the word of mouth publicity resulted in an average call log of 800 calls per day.

“The helpline is getting good response without been formally launched. Post-formal launch, we will get more calls,” said information, education and communication bureau (IEC) deputy director, Dr Vilas Deshpande.

Health advice call centre incharge, Dr TK Pandve, said that on an average about 800 calls are received per day. “The calls are increasing daily. In many situations, we have been able to give life-saving information to callers like calls regarding snakebite, poisoning cases, complicated pregnancies or disease breakouts. For eg, we have begun to get calls from health workers on chickenpox cases in certain areas,” said Pandve.

However, he added that since most publicity about the helpline is through health workers, a formal launch can help as more activities can be carried out to spread information about the helpline later. “We have certain restrictions now,” he said.

Sources added that publicity material like literature on the helpline cannot be distributed amongst healthcare workers, auxiliary nurse midwifes and anganwadi workers unless the launch takes place.

Meanwhile, the officials added that the early response to helpline despite obvious lack of publicity is a good indicator of the success of the helpline.

“The helpline is started to prevent maternal mortality rate and will definitely prove to be a success story given the kind of queries received,” said Pandve.