Serious concern
A report that accessed the prevailing status of 100 emergency and injury care centres in government and private hospital settings across India has claimed that the number of beds available at emergency departments accounted for only 3-5 per cent of total hospital beds.
The report titled ‘Emergency and Injury Care at Secondary and Tertiary Level Centres in India’, prepared by the Department of Emergency Medicine, AIIMS was submitted to Niti Aayog.
As per the report, most of the hospitals lacked presence of general doctors, specialists and nursing staff dedicated for emergency departments vis-a-vis the average footfall of patients, even though the hospitals as such, had sufficient overall numbers of required human resource.
The report assessed the prevailing status of 100 emergency and injury care centres in government and private hospital settings in 28 states and 2 union territories of India, in addition to 34 district hospitals.
Amongst the critical infra-related quality parameters assessed in the emergency departments (EDs), the following were important deficiencies: absence of point of care lab (73 per cent), demarcated triage area (65 per cent), police control room (56 per cent), separate access for ambulance (55 per cent) and adequate spacing for emergency department (52 per cent).
The report claimed that emergency and injury cases annually accounted for 9-13 per cent of all patients presenting to a health facility and 19-24 per cent of admissions in government hospitals and 31-39 per cent admissions in private hospitals.
The report noted that while compliance with availability of overall recommended biomedical equipment and critical equipment were largely found satisfactory at all private hospitals (86-93 per cent) and government medical college hospitals (68 per cent), deficiencies were found largely in smaller government hospitals (45-60 per cent).
Noting that since it is essential to have the complete list of all recommended emergency medicines 24X7 in the emergency departments, the report said assessment done for this aspect revealed that only 9 per cent of all hospitals fulfilled this criterion.
According to the report, many government medical colleges lacked common HDU (55 per cent), Cardiac ICU (55 per cent) and Neuro ICU (55 per cent).
In addition, they also lacked facilities for Coronary Artery By-pass Graft (55 per cent), Cardiac Cath Labs (30 per cent) and interventional radiology (40 per cent), it said.
The report pointed out that most of the hospitals did not have a dedicated blood bank in the emergency department nor an existing standard protocol for massive blood transfusion.
While 91 per cent of hospitals had in-house ambulances, the report said trained paramedics needed to assist ambulance services were present only in 34 per cent.
The report pointed out that only 19 per cent hospitals had a mobile stroke/ STEMI (for heart attack) program, with only 4 per cent having a mobile stroke unit.
Though the report has been submitted to the Niti Aayog a complete follow up needs to be done about the findings of the report as it has presented a grim picture of the healthcare sector in the country. The point should be noted that all efforts should be put in place to plug all the loopholes especially during the times of pandemic when the healthcare infrastructure is already under stress.
KV Network
