 At a time when there is no stopping the government from touting India as the next medical destination for the world, it seems there is total disregard for the treatment needs of our own people. Today, trauma is a big killer for people in the highly productive age group of five to 40. Every year, nearly one lakh people die due to trauma and yet there is negligible focus on the issue of emergency medicine and trauma-related infrastructure. Even in the metros, it is just confined to ambulances and demarcating rooms for related cases. Even doctors accept that trauma centres in the country have junior doctors, mostly interning. TSI spoke to many doctors and specialists just to understand the seriousness of the issue. The most crucial period, the “golden hour”, according to the experts, is the first hour that can determine between life or death for a patient. Hence, for our country where pro-active thinking is like a flash in the pan and issues like health are neglected and good emergency care is going to be a dream for decades. While we were researching on this issue, AIIMS, emerged as one of the three training centres in this area. Max Hospital. too, has started a course in Emergency and Trauma medicine in collaboration with the US. But for nearly a year now, AIIMS has been able to churn out just 160 doctors who are well versed with this management and Max will have to wait for another year to see its doctors going out to treat people in trauma cases.
Dr Mahesh Chandra Mishra, the pioneer of this movement, is busy training doctors and believes that trauma management is a must for every doctor. He has developed the concept of A, B and C types of diagnosis to make this stream easy to understand for a common man. He says that if the A, B & C levels are normal, then comes the time for secondary diagnosis, but doctors don’t even have the basic training like helping a patient to breathe, if the wind pipe is choked. His course in Life Support for Trauma patients will not be of much use in the absence of readily available ambulances. "We have a severe shortage of trauma-equipped ambulances, whether in the big cities or anywhere else in the country," he says.
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