SIMS Hospital has launched a GPS-enabled ambulance system with a central dispatch centre on Tuesday.
At an event on Tuesday, Sridhar K., vice president - medical, explained that the hospital’s quick response emergency service was aimed at getting patients into the hospital within the golden hour. “Accidents, heart attacks and strokes form most of the emergencies. The GPS-enabled ambulances will be parked in the perimeter of the city for faster deployment. They are fully loaded with ventilators and defribillators. A centrally-located dispatch centre, which is at the hospital in Vadapalani, will provide instructions to bystanders/attendants and locate the nearest ambulance to the site to dispatch,” he said.
Users can either call 2002020 or use an app that the hospital will be launching to call for an ambulance. App users can track the progress of the ambulance on a map. Drivers, emergency medical technicians, nurses and medical officers have all been trained by a team from Brigham Hospital, Boston, U.S., he said.
SRM Group chairman Ravi Pachamoothoo said this was just the beginning and more would be done to create something useful for the public.
Zayed Yasin, consultant emergency physician, Brigham Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and others also participated.
