Indian hospitals offer intensive care from afar

 07-Feb-16, Reuters 

A doctor at a hospital in India's capital, New Delhi, was recently tracking a wall of monitors displaying the vital signs of intensive care patients admitted hundreds of miles away when red-and-yellow alerts rang out.

Image: Thomson Reuters

The oxygen flow to a 67-year-old patient had stopped when no critical care doctors were present in a hospital in the northern city of Amritsar. But the doctor in the New Delhi centre run by Fortis Healthcare quickly issued a set of instructions and stopped the patient from suffering brain damage or death.

India's top private hospitals, seizing on a shortage of critical-care doctors, are expanding into the remote management of intensive care units around the country and, starting this month, in neighbouring Bangladesh too.

India has seven doctors for every 10,000 people, half the global average. The country needs more than 50,000 critical care specialists, but has just 8,350. Such a shortage of doctors means small facilities in India's $55 billion private hospital market are ill equipped to provide critical care even as numbers seeking private healthcare rise because the public health system is in even worse shape.

 Read the full article 

 Insights