from Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Panaji (GA)

Panaji, Apr 7: Although the natural calamities and other emergency situations on the rise, India is yet to have satisfactory emergency medical system, a senior government official opined.
 
“In India, we will have about 5,46,000 road accident cases annually by 2020 and it will become major cause of death and disability. Therefore we cannot be oblivion to the emergency care in the hospital,” Dr A K Das, additional director general of health services, government of India, said.
 
He said that cardiac diseases and stroke will be a major cause of death and disability in India by 2020.
 
Dr Das was speaking during the World health day function organized by state government in Panaji on Tuesday April 7 morning.
 
“We don’t have a responsive and time sensitive emergency medical system. The issue is that private hospitals don’t accept the emergency cases which government hospital have to accept,” Dr Das lamented.
 
He said that the hospital based emergency care in India is far from satisfactory. “ The government of India has empowered every district collector to have a district disaster management committee but that has to be fortified,” Dr Das added.
 
Dishing out the worldwide estimates, he said that in 2008 alone estimated 321 incidents of natural calamity occurred which killed 2.35 lac people and 2008 alone the disaster were more compared to earlier years.
 
“Unless hospitals are safe where will we go?,” he questioned stressing for the safety of hospitals in such disaster prone areas.
 
Dr Das said that Asia is the most disaster-affected continent. “It is home to nine of the world’s ten most affected countries,” he said.
 
The additional director general said that the impact is maximum on the developing countries. “Only 11 per cent of the people prone to natural calamities lives in developing countries but they account for more than 53 per cent of deaths due to natural disaster,” he stated.
 
Stating that emergency and trauma care is a catch word for union government, Dr Das said that the government support any emergency trauma care facility.