‘You feel omnipresent’: bringing city care to India’s country hospitals

September 22

With no intensive care available in remote areas, many patients died on their way to city hospitals. Now rural medics are using tele-ICU systems to save lives

• Photographs by Elke Scholiers for the Guardian

Whenever an ambulance arrived with a critically ill patient, Dr R Mubarak’s heart would sink. His small country hospital in Bagepalli, like most rural government hospitals in India, had no intensive-care unit. Families had to take the patient, who was perhaps on the brink of death, on a two-hour drive to the general hospital in Bengaluru.

“Often the patient came back in the same ambulance, dead. They never made it,” says Mubarak. “I knew I could be signing their death warrant by sending them but I had no choice.”

Source Link

View full article