The terror attacks that resulted in mass casualty has given the much needed push to the ailing emergency medical services (EMS) that was taking feeble steps since the last one year.
BMC plans to integrate its ambulances with pvt hospitals to enable quick action during crisis
The terror attacks that resulted in mass casualty has given the much needed push to the ailing emergency medical services (EMS) that was taking feeble steps since the last one year.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning to integrate their pool of ambulances with the ones belonging to private hospitals and connect them through the global positioning system (GPS).
The scheme of things also include more frequent mock drills in the civic-run hospitals about ways to tackle situations that cause mass casualties.
Earlier, in the month of November, global experts came to the city to scrutinise its disaster management plans. The BMC, Hinduja Hospital, Life Supporters Institute of Health Services (LIHS) and the Mumbai University had initiated the Mumbai Emergency Management Exercise (MEMS) to scrutinise the disaster management plans.
According to Dr Paresh Navalkar, director, LIHS, the experience gathered in the drill was successfully put to use as an ambulance had reached Café Leopold within 12-15 minutes of the joint being attacked. “A foreigner with bullet injuries was immediately rushed to St George Hospital and before that he was stabilised in the ambulance,” he said. Later, the patient was air-lifted and sent to his own country.
Navalkar, however, said that better coordination between the police, fire and ambulance can be expected after the EMS falls into place.
The BMC is trying to integrate its own services primarily. “We have ambulances in
hospitals and fire brigade. A central call centre equipped with a GPS system can help in immediate and quality response,” said joint municipal commissioner SS Shinde. “We are trying to synchronise the services even for day-to-day accidents,” he added.
In the MEMS, doctors and paramedics were trained on the new concept of ‘platinum hour’ of 10 minutes against the good old ‘golden hour’ of 60 minutes.
The idea of EMS is that an ambulance should rush the patient to the nearest hospital within 12 minutes of the casualty. Thus Mumbai requires approximately 70 ambulances for the EMS to work efficiently.
Besides, the Mumbai University, LIHS and several NGOs are kicking off the Mumbai Voices campaign wherein they would evaluate the voices and opinions of people who were victims of the attack. “The opinions of how the victims found the emergency services and their feedback would be compiled and submitted to various agencies,” said Navalkar.
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