As part of its initiatives to expand affordable heart-care services to poor and marginalised sections in rural areas, Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research (SJICR) has come up with programme to link all government taluk hospitals with the SJICR branch in Kalaburagi.
Addressing a media conference at the SJICR branch hospital here on Monday, C.N. Manjunath, Director of the Institute, said that the initiative, named as Heart Attack Management Programme, had received a nod from the SJICR management and the Department of Health and Family Welfare.
“Heart diseases are no longer the disease of only the rich as they have numerically grown from 2 per cent in 1960 to 12 per cent in 2016 covering people from almost all walks of life and all age groups. However, rural medical set-ups are not well-equipped for handling heart related issues. We are therefore addressing planning to connect government taluk hospitals with SJICR in Kalaburagi for offering better heart-care services to poor rural population,” he said.
A two-day workshop would shortly be conducted in Kalaburagi where a doctor from each taluk hospital in Bidar, Kalaburagi and Yadgir districts will get basic training for handling heart-related diseases with preliminary medication and procedures such as thrombolysis. The ECGs taken at these hospitals would immediately transmitted to the SJICR branch office in Kalaburagi and its main campus in Bengaluru, where expert cardiologists would examine the reports and guide the doctors handling the cases in taluk hospitals. After the screening and preliminary treatment, the patients would be shifted to Kalaburagi branch hospital for further procedures such as angiogram and angioplasty.
“It is our aim to put similar telemedicine system in place all over Karnataka. To start with, we have doing it in three backward districts of Hyderabad Karnataka region. The estimated budget of Rs. 85 lakh for providing equipments, medicines and other machinery such as ECG machine to taluk hospitals has been sanctioned. The project will take off within three months,” Dr. Manjunath said.
Minister of State for Medical Education Sharan Prakash Patil and senior doctors of SJICR, Kalaburagi were present.
