Transport woes for patients: C’garh mother, baby reach hospital on a cot due to bad roads

In Chhattisgarh, a mother and her newborn were carried on a cot to reach a hospital due to bad roads.

Raipur, Nov 27: Forget about creating "green corridors" for critically ill patients, in rural areas of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Chhattisgarh, there are hardly any motorable roads to help patients travel in a vehicle to reach hospital even during an emergency situation.

Recently, a woman in Chhattisgarh after giving birth to her baby in a local health centre developed some medical complications. The doctors at the centre asked the relatives of the patients to shift both the mother and newborn to another health centre with better facilities to deal with the problem.

The second health centre was around three kilometers away and there are no motorable roads connecting both the hospitals. So, the relatives of the patients decided to carry the mother and baby on a cot to deal with the situation.

"Chhattisgarh: Woman and her newborn baby carried on a cot for three kms from Balrampur's Virendranagar health center to Wadrafnagar's Murkaul health center due to bad road connectivity. The woman had developed health complexity after giving birth. She was later referred to Ambikapur," reported ANI.

Chhattisgarh: Woman & her new-born baby carried on a cot for 3 km from Balrampur's Virendranagar health center to Wadrafnagar's
Murkaul health center due to bad road connectivity. The woman had developed health complexity after giving birth. She was later referred to Ambikapur. pic.twitter.com/VEyv6fh0Aw

— ANI (@ANI) November 26, 2017

Once in a while, we hear about reports of authorities creating "green corridors" for patients in big cities like Chennai and Bengaluru. But such an effort on the part of the administration looks like a distant dream in villages of India where mostly the poor and neglected reside.

A "green corridor" is a special route to enable immediate medical care and facilitate timely travel of harvested organs from one hospital to another. The street signals are manually operated to avoid red lights and peak traffic.

Recently, a similar incident was reported from Odisha, where a doctor carried his patient, again a woman immediately after her delivery, on his shoulders.

Omkar Hota hogged the limelight after he decided to walk eight kilometers from his hospital to attend a pregnant woman in labour pain in a remote village of Malkangiri district, infamous for the Maoist insurgency.

Hota walked eight kms to help the woman deliver her baby as the patient could not come to the hospital on her own because her village Sarigeta is yet to get proper road connectivity.

The 'good doctor' did not stop at that. After delivery, the patient developed some complication and she needed further treatment. It is then that Hota decided to take the woman to the hospital.

However, as the patient was too weak to walk, the doctor and her family members put her in a cane bed and carried the new mother on their shoulders. Thus Hota walked another eight kms back to his hospital, but this time with the patient on his shoulders.

The reports of patients and dead bodies being carried by relatives on shoulders because of lack of availability of ambulances or bad roads have become so common in the country now that such instances no more are any wake-up calls for our authorities to end the crisis.

OneIndia