Bhubaneswar: In a bid to save lives of accident victims, Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy Saturday asked the officials concerned to strengthen the ‘Golden Hour Management’ system with definite standard of procedure (SOP) for first 48 hours of free treatment.
Chairing a high-level meeting at Lok Seva Bhawan here, Tripathy instructed Health & Family Welfare (H&FW) secretary PK Meherda to prepare an SOP to implement ‘Golden Hour Management’ for free treatment of accident victims in hospitals.
As per the government orders, all the private and government hospitals must provide the best quality life saving treatment to the accident victims during the first 48 hours free of cost.
H&FW department would soon issue an SOP in this regard. Guidelines for stabilising the patients in the ambulance itself would also be issued by the department, official sources said.
He also directed to bring all the private and government ambulances under the umbrella of one common call centre to provide earliest service to the victims.
Discussions revealed that at present 512 ‘108-Ambulances’ and 19 fire station ambulances are providing this emergency service during the ‘Golden Hour’. Similarly, National Highways Authorities of India (NHAI) has also deployed one ambulance for a stretch of 50 km on National Highways.
Besides, many private ambulances run by the private hospitals, charity institutions and corporate houses are also in operation. A first hand preliminary estimation shows that there are around 1,562 such private sector ambulances in state.
It was decided in the meeting that ‘technical standards’ for registration of an ambulance would be prepared by Health department keeping in view the National Ambulance Code. This would specify the equipment, paramedic staff, medicines and other life saving gadgets for an ambulance, the sources said.
Each ambulance would also have one GPS tracking device for indicating its exact location and movement so that necessary assistance and instructions could be given to the personnel in the vehicle as and when required. The Commerce & Transport departments would register an ambulance only when it satisfies the required technical standards.