BHUBANESWAR: Odisha is one of the five states and UTs selected for piloting a state-of-the-art advanced emergency care system (EMS) being developed by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in collaboration with national health institutes to reduce preventable and treatable mortality in the country.
The India-EMS project will be implemented as part of a national health research priority project in five districts in the country including Puri in Odisha. Other districts included in the first phase are Ludhiana in Punjab, Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, Vadodara in Gujarat and Puducherry.
AIIMS-Bhubaneswar will implement the project that aims at transforming the critical care facilities and addressing a wide range of acute conditions, including communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases, pregnancy and injury through a high quality patient-centric integrated model.
Emergency care in the health facilities will be transformed by improving logistics, competency of health care providers, use of information technology, artificial intelligence-based tools, facility mapping and several other parameters. Improving ambulance services and response time, increasing community demand and training of first-level responders will also be part of the project.
Additional professor of AIIMS and principal investigator Dr Arvind Kumar Singh said seven key health emergencies - heart attack, brain stroke, trauma, snake bite, poisoning, neonatal and maternal complications which lead to most of the deaths will be dealt with the integrated model. “A research team will collect data, evaluate the current status of care in Puri district and accordingly strategise the emergency care in close collaboration with the state government and ICMR. The team has undergone a specialised training for the project,” he said.
ICMR has envisaged the project after noticing that the current acute emergency care system suffers from severe fragmentation. Lack of coordination and accountability for using resources to their maximum efficiency has led to a number of gaps in the delivery of emergency care across states.
A senior ICMR scientist Dr Meenakshi Sharma said the target is to introduce better interventions through the hub and spoke model along with AI-based applications to address time-sensitive acute emergency conditions. “It will bring all healthcare professionals and hospitals together to plan emergency care. Once successful, the model can be implemented in other districts in phases,” she said.
A study conducted by NITI Aayog during 2019-21 found that emergency and injury cases accounted for 19 per cent to 36 per cent of annual hospital admissions. Emergency medical diseases contributed to 50.7 per cent of mortality and 41.5 per cent of all burden of diseases globally.
India-EMS
Puri district in Odisha included in the pilot phase Project aims to reduce preventable deaths by transforming emergency and critical care - Heart attack, brain stroke, trauma, snake bite, poisoning, neonatal and maternal complications - including medical emergency and trauma account for 19%-36% of annual hospital admissions