For several decades now, across the globe, emergency medical response services have formed an indispensable part of a robust healthcare ecosystem. And India is no exception. Being a country with over 1.4 billion population, and one that keeps witnessing extremely high prevalence of life-threatening diseases, accidents, and natural disasters year on year, it comes as no surprise that the demand of emergency health services in India is ever increasing.
Establishing superlative emergency healthcare infrastructure is the key to respond to the immediate and urgent needs of our people – ensuring that they can receive medical attention when and where they need it the most, and most importantly, contributing (potentially) towards saving the lives of lakhs of Indians every year! After all, every medical practitioner swears by the fact that timely and effective treatment, if and when provided during the ‘Golden Hour’, can be a life-saviour. For the uninitiated, the Golden Hour in medical terminology refers to the extremely critical period – usually the first few minutes to one hour — after an accident, medical emergency or trauma occurs.
The emergency patient care and medical services space in India has gained tremendous traction in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic proved to be an eye-opener in terms of exposing the vulnerabilities and limitations of the nation’s healthcare system, it also simultaneously highlighted the latent yet growing need to focus on optimizing the affordability and accessibility of advanced medical emergency oriented products and services such as rapid hospitalization transport, critical care and intensive care units, oxygen concentrators, ventilators, among others.
Despite showcasing promising growth potential, the country’s emergency healthcare sector today is fraught with a number of challenges. One major concern that has persistently remained is the shortage of adequately skilled and trained emergency healthcare professionals such as paramedics, triage nurses, emergency care technicians, etc. For addressing this gap, the Indian government and private sector have, in the recent years, launched several education and training programmes. Other challenges include lack of necessary infrastructure as well as the oft-noticed lack of coordination amongst emergency care stakeholders.
That being said, India’s emergency healthcare woes are actually ‘opportunities in disguise’ and thus represent a space ripe for innovation in the years to come. In the recent years, we have seen a lot of start-ups in the country’s healthcare and health-tech domains working towards revolutionizing this sector, with their tech-enabled innovations solving for optimizing accident tracking, in-site healthcare professionals’ accessibility, swift ambulance dispatch, emergency preparedness, and so on. These innovations, combined with the latest advances in emerging-tech such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Telemedicine and their integration into the existing healthcare systems, can prove to be transformative game-changers in the longer run.
Furthermore, several private hospitals and healthcare centres have taken the right lessons from the pandemic, and are now working towards ramping up their emergency healthcare equipment and ambulance fleets, and towards minimizing response times. At the same time, the Government is also increasingly stressing on addressing a wide variety of emergencies faced by citizens and taking a slew of initiatives to this end such as Ayushman Bharat, introducing emergency health response preparedness packages, and the recent launch of a nationwide integrated response mechanism via a single emergency helpline number: ‘112’.
All in all, it can be concluded that we as nation are taking steps in the right direction – the direction of better healthcare and healing. And alongside, the future of advanced new-age emergency healthcare services in India right now is looking brighter than ever before.
