The Gannavaram Airport that serves the city, is now one of the few select ones that have an emergency-cum-first aid centre with Automatic External Defibrillator, with the formal inauguration of such a facility on the terminal building premises on Sunday.
The Dr.NTR University of Health Sciences Registrar S. Babu Lal while inaugurating the First Aid Centre equipped with a tele-medicine facility put up by Dr. Ramesh Hospitals, said that this facility will come in handy for patients suffering heart attacks and with passenger traffic increasing this becomes essential. Reminding everyone of the incident in which a Belgian national had to be rushed from the Gannavaram Airport to the city last month for immediate angiogram, he complimented the hospital chief cardiologist P. Ramesh Babu for taking up the initiative to provide medicare free of cost with a trained doctor posted there.
The Airport Director B.G. Patil launching the services in a small room attached to the passenger lounge, promised Dr. Ramesh that a bigger room would be provided to carryout the first-aid operations once the airport expansion takes place. Dr. Ramesh said that all the staff of the Airport Authority and other airlines working there could take advantage of the facility between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.
The Airport Director announced that people from villages around the airport could also make use of this facility. The Tele-medicine facility will be connected 24-hours to the main hospital in the city and this is the fourth such facility launched by the hospital in the past one month. On Saturday it was launched in Repalle and very soon it will be launched on the Vijayawada Railway Station premises and Thiruvuru, Dr. Ramesh added.
The hospital management consultant M.C. Das, Andhra Chamber of Commerce president M. Murali Krishna and other former people’s representatives from Gannavaram were present on the occasion.
