Medical facilities in remote rural
villages
There has been widespread practice of sending the mobile medical van
with doctors and medicines in the remote rural villages. How much impact does
it make on the lives of the people? Does it meet the need of people when
they need the medical assistance?
Sending mobile
medical van in a village once a week does not meet the expectation of
villagers. People need medical attention when they fall sick and not when
the medical van comes.
In contrast the emergency medical care system (popularly known as 108 ambulances)
made significant impact and saved many lives. The concept has been
replicated by many states.
The main reason of success was
1. Providing the facility at a time and place of the need when there is
an emergency.
2. A complete system with forward and backward linkage was created.
This include making a phone call, tracing the phone location on a map,
establishing coordination with police as it may involve accident cases,
locating the ambulance with lifesaving facilities at strategic location, tie
up with the hospitals with agreement to provide medical help before completing
formalities etc.
The medical facilities in remote rural village need innovative ideas:
For villagers preventive
Healthcare is more cost effective to poor people than curative. They need the medical facility beyond the
normal working hours in the field. The
medical facility need to ensure availability, affordability and accessibility alongwith
reliability and dependability. Since deployment
of doctor in each village is not viable, modified telemedicine system could be
a viable solution.
The primary health centre equipped
with computer, broadband connection and a laboratory is setup and a trained village
health worker or AYUSH doctor is deployed to interact with doctors at remote
computer centre through video conference.
The doctors could see the patient condition on the video, get the test
report and prescribe the medicines and treatment. In case of emergency, patient could be referred
to regular hospital.
Under the CSR, corporate
could provide link to their hospitals and evacuate the patient in ambulance in
case of emergencies. The system will be more
economical and provide the real time benefit to villagers as compared to
sending mobile medical vans.
A writeup copied from the
net on the project initiated by ILFS is given below alongwith the links.
Your views/ comments are
invited
Dinesh Agrawal
Ayush Dept to roll out telemedicine hubs for Indian medicines in more
rural areas
Joseph Alexander, New Delhi
The Department of AYUSH, in association
with the Infrastructure Financial
and Leasing Services (IL&FS),has
completed a pilot project of telemedicine to deliver the entire gamut of
treatment facilities of different Indian streams of medicines under one roof.
Named as ‘Ayush Swasthya Kendra’, the
telemedicine hub delivers expert treatment including the tertiary care at the
already set-up 20 centres in the far-flung rural areas with the support of the
specialists from Kolkata. This 20
centres, 11 in Tripura and 9 in Bihar, have been carrying out diagnosis and
treatment under different streams like Ayurveda, Homoeopathy and Unani.
The health division at the
IFLS has set up the centres and was providing the technological support under
the pilot project, besides carrying out the entire implementation
aspects. Each centre has been set
up at a cost of around Rs.10 lakh with video conferencing, testing facilities
while the medicines were either provided by the Ayush department or the
patients were asked to source from outside.
Further details are available at
following links:
http://www.ilfsets.com/health/ictforhealth/
