Free ambulance services 24X7 in Himachal Pradesh from October 2

The Indian state of Himachal Pradesh will soon start free ambulance services round-the-clock to help the needy patients with critical care, reports said.

The ambulance equipped with all the necessary primary care systems in place will be ready on call all the twenty four hours in the key cities of Himachal Pradesh.

The government of Himachal Pradesh plans to start the ambulance service in the state in a phased manner.

In the first phase, the ambulances would in Sirmaur, Solan, Una and Hamirpur districts on October 2.

The state government plans to cover all the districts would except tribal Kinnaur and Lahaul and Spiti districts by December 25 in the first phase of the programme itself.

Himachal Pradesh government has signed an agreement with a private company to start round-the-clock, free-of-cost ambulance services in the state by the end of this year, Health Minister Rajeev Bindal said.

‘A PPP (public-private-partnership) agreement was signed between the government and Hyderabad-based company GVK-EMRI to run 108 ambulances in the state,’ he said.

Himachal would be the first state in the country to have one ambulance for 75,000 people, which is close to the World Health Organisation (WHO) standards,” according GVK-EMRI chief executive officer Venkat Chengavalli.

While the public-private-partnership will remain the norm for all the key areas of Himachal Pradesh, the state government would run the ambulance services on its own in the tribal districts.

GVK-EMRI currently runs 2,600 ambulances in 10 states across India and Himachal Pradesh would be the 11th state in its coverage, reports said.

Recently, the Bangalore-based NephroLife Care has started a tracking system to enable quicker dialysis treatment to save lives of patients who are suffering from chronic kidney ailments.

As a means to deliver dialysis without losing a minute, NephroLife Care has launched ambulances installed with global positioning system (GPS)  tracking system

The GPS tracking system allows NephroLife Care centre to monitor vehicles within one metre radius through satellite imaging. This will help to assist the needy patients quicker by rushing to the nearest possible dialysis location as GPS enables networking with various dialysis machines located at different centres in Bangalore.

NephroLife Care is the first centre in South Asia to network dialysis machines,according to Shriram Vijayakumar, managing director & founder, NephroLife.

The advanced GPS technology allows NephroLife Care us to enhance safety and ensure timeliness for dialysis patients pioneering as India’s first dialysis centre to have GPS enabled patient vans, the hospital sources stated.