The Critical Care in India is at the crossroads of development and it require highly dedicated efforts to achieve the target of providing a scientific, humane, and meaningful service to the critically ill patients, Fr Shaji Vazhayil, Chief Executive Officer of the Pushpagiri Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Thiruvalla.
Fr Vazhayil was inaugurating the national seminar on `Critical Care’ at PIMS Senate Hall on Sunday.
He said care of the critically ill patients assumes much significance in modern clinical practice.
Giving a talk on `Transfusion in ICU’, Mathew Pulicken, Head of the Department of Critical Care at PIMS, said the growth of quality healthcare in India over the past 50 years was evident in the fact
that the average life span, which was only 21 in the pre-independence era, has now been improved to 64 years. This owes mainly to the public health measures and provision of quality critical care in hospitals.
According to Dr. Pulicken, critical care in India had its beginning in the late 1960s and the early intensive care units (ICUs) were primitive in technology. The evolution of corporate hospitals had
brought significant improvement in the infrastructure and standard of care at the ICUs in the 1980s, he said.
The Pulmonologist and consultant in Critical Care at the Apollo Hospital in Chennai, Babu K. Abraham, delivered the keynote address on `Shock Resuscitation’.
Jojo Kurian John, chief critical care consultant at the Medical Trust Hospital in Kochi led the session on Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome management and P.S. Shereek from Sree Uthradom Tirunal Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram spoke on `Infection control in Intensive Care Unit’.
The chief critical care consultant at KIMS, Kochi, Sreevalsan, delivered a lecture on `Nutrition and the critically ill’.
The panel discussion on ethical dilemmas in ICUs was held, later, in the afternoon.
The session emphasised the importance of judicious use of life-supportive interventions on geriatric patients, how to improve on communication with patients’ relatives in the management of critically ill patients and how to evolve a low-cost, affordable, intensive care system in our social set up.
As many as 150 medical professionals from different parts of the country attended the seminar.
Mathew Ninan, Rosely Thomas, A.S. Mathew, Susan Tharian, Seema Oommen, and Tomy Philip, experts in the fields of Pulmonology, Microbiology, and Emergency Medicine, took part in the panel discussion.
