Doctors in cold desert to be trained to tackle emergencies

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, August 18

The Directorate of Health Services, Kashmir (DHSK), is going to train doctors and paramedics from the cold desert in Ladakh to tackle medical emergencies.

Health officials said the training would include basic life support (BLS), a pre-hospital care given to victims of disasters and trauma, emergency trauma and advanced cardiac life support.

“Health professionals posted at vital health institutions of Ladakh will be trained in basic life support to avoid death in accident-prone areas of the cold desert,” a senior health official said.

The training would be held at the state-of-the-art Kashmir Skill and Simulation Centre (KSSC), Doabiwan, in Tangmarg in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.

He said the training would start from the first week of September and would continue for the next few months in a phased manner.

In the first phase, he said the training would involve 12 doctors from various specialties functioning in the Ladakh health institutions. “The training will be held for one week and followed by other batches from Ladakh,” he said.

The department had sent a team of specialist master trainers in 2013 to Leh and Kargil to impart training to 60 health professionals.

More than 600 doctors and 7,000 people from different professions have been trained in basic life support since 2012 at Simulation centre.

The KSSC — a trauma and emergency management program — was adjudged as one of the best practices at the 4th National Summit on Good, Replicable and Innovative Practices in Public Healthcare System in India last month.

Director, DHSK, Dr Saleem-ur-Rehman said the BLS, as well as advanced life support (ALS) training, paid the dividends during the 2014 floods and last year.

He said the trauma victims were properly managed by the people trained with the BLS and the ALS. “It certainly has brought down the number of referrals from periphery hospitals to tertiary care trauma hospitals in Srinagar,” he said. He said the DHSK would launch a comprehensive emergency room skill course soon to impart advanced medical emergency training to health professionals under a pre-devised training curriculum.