BENGALURU: With Gaganyaan (Human Spaceflight) Mission coming up in 2022, S Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), appreciated the role of medical professionals and the need to collaborate more with them for the spaceflight mission. He said, “If we have to conduct a successful human spaceflight and sustain it in India, we need a strong pool of doctors to get involved in the mission.
There are opportunities for such collaborations not just in Emergency medicine, but also in other domains.” He was speaking before a gathering of doctors from hospitals across the country and ISRO scientists at the ISRO Headquarters in the city. They were to brainstorm on the possibilities of knowledge sharing by ISRO . This will upgrade healthcare in 11 hospitals across the country in handling emergency care and critical care departments to reduce mortality rates.
The doctors released the preintervention data of 11 hospitals that were studied for over a year in collaboration with Association of Healthcare Professionals of India (AHPI) and Society for Emergency Medicine in India (SEMI). The survey kept nine key performance indicators (KPIs) which included the time taken from the door to triage by the nurse to door to lab investigations ordering time. For instance, “Medium values which were found across all the sites for door to triage (nurse) were in the range of one to 15 minutes.
The mean value of time taken from initial assessment to see the doctor was about 6 minutes to 33 minutes across these hospitals,” explained Dr R Jitendra, who worked on the QUEST study . The post intervention study leveraging space technology will now be used at these hospitals in two areas -- emergency care and critical care departments -- to see how best they can be changed and handled “error free” reducing mortality numbers. Listing out the areas of cooperation, Dr Alexander Thomas, President, AHPI, proposed a collaboration with ISRO on geo-mapping of an accident and emergency centres, in order to have accurate information on the type of services and level of care available in the healthcare facilities.