CHENNAI: In a bid to ensure patients in the state get proper medical care during the golden hour, the Tamil Nadu government is mulling the conversion of a government chopper into an air ambulance, according to an official.
An expression of interest (EOI) was floated a couple of days ago to appoint a consultant to work out the costs of converting a chopper into an air ambulance, said the official.
This comes after Chief Minister Edapaddi K Palaniswami announced that the state was planning to set up an air ambulance facility which will help pick up victims from faraway places and get them to tertiary care centres that are at least 200-300 km away. The announcement was made after he toured King’s Hospital in London last year.
An official source said that since patients are often brought to hospitals from faraway places resulting in delay in treatment during the critical hour, the government was planning a similar model on the lines of the London hospital.
A source said that the government is planning to convert the state government chopper into an air ambulance after studying the feasibility of doing it. "The government chopper has been lying idle and we are thinking of converting it into an air ambulance as it would benefit the people," a government official said.
Currently, the country has seven or eight air ambulance operators, while some private medical institutions like Apollo Hospitals operate their own services.
It is learnt that the International Critical Care Air Transfer Team (ICATT), an organisation which is currently offering air ambulance services in the country, is already in discussion with the state government in this regard.
Dr Rahul Singh Sardar and Dr Shalini Nalwad, directors and co-founders of ICATT, told The New Indian Express that they had been having discussions with the earlier health secretary Beela Rajesh prior to the COVID-19 pandemic on providing entire air ambulance end to end solutions.
Launching such ambulance services by the state is the need of the hour, they said, while hailing the role of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in taking such measures.
Experts feel air ambulance services should not be considered as only a mechanism to fly patients. The focus should be on providing critical care right from flying the patients from their homes or nearby facilities to the tertiary care centres through trained professionals.
But will the air ambulance services be affordable for the common man? Head of marketing, ICATT, Fahim Husain, says that as per the financial mechanism worked out by it, the cost will not be higher either for the government operating the service or for the common man.