Travel Blogue Day 12: “Emergency! Go Faster!”

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 29

Until three years ago, there was no 911 emergency service in India. Ramalinga Raju, chairman and founder of Satyam Computer, one of the country’s largest IT outsourcing firms, decided to change that. He set up the Emergency Medical Research Institute in Hyderabad and started piloting an emergency service, using the dial numbers 108. Now, EMRI is serving 147 million people in three states. Raju plans on eventually covering the entire country. So far, the government handles 90% of the costs and Raju covers the rest.

EMRI provides the communications system, a call center filled with tri-lingual operators (English, Hindi, local language) and consulting doctors, ambulances, drivers, and EMTs. Here’s Kumar Gulla, 24, one of the EMTs in Hyderabad.

Inside the call center you hear a constant babble of voices. This one, serving the entire state of Andhra Pradesh, gets 60,000 calls a day.

When a call comes in, the operators take down information and pull up a map of the area to pinpoint which ambulance is closest. They dispatch the ambulance and can track its progress using GPS. In Hydrabad, there are 15 to 20 ambulances operating at a time—meaning those few are serving a population of more than 6 million. It keeps them busy.

We headed out into the city to find an ambulance. The plan was to ride along on a call. It took a while to connect with one, since they’re constantly moving. We became ambulance chasers.

Finally we connected with EMT Kumar and his driver partner Krishna Gandamalla, pictured below, in the neighborhood of Amberpet. They had just returned from an attempted murder call. The victim, a young man, had been stabbed in the stomach and was bleeding profusely. Kumar bandaged him and started an IV while Krishna high-tailed it for the hospital.

We milled around at a police station where the ambulance was parked shooting the breeze with a group of officers who had gathered to plan for the Bonalu festival, a pray-for-harvest celebration, that was to begin the next day. In recent days, a series of bombs had gone off in Indian cities, and there was a lot of concern about bombs in Hyderabad. Finally, Kumar got a call on his cell phone. A woman was suffering extreme abdominal pain at a pharmacy nearby. We jumped into the ambulance and took off. She was less than a kilometer away. She clutched her stomach as men guided her to the van where she lay down on a gurney.

The woman asked to be taken to a government hospital even though it was potentially 30 minutes away—because it would be free. That’s even though she may have a burst appendix. We took off on a wild ride through Hyderabad’s rain-soaked rush hour traffic. The Indian drivers typically jam their cars into every space available—ignoring travel lanes and traffic laws. Also, they’re not accustomed to ambulances, and many don’t know that you’re supposed to get out of the way when an ambulance wants to get through. So Krishna steered with his right hand while holding a microphone in his left (which he also used to shift gears) and shouted through the PA system at drivers ahead of us, ordering them to get out of the way. “Emergency! Please sir! Move faster!” We dodged a small herd of buffalo and swerved around an ox pulling a cart piled with hay. “Side, please! Ambulance!” He called out the numbers of the cars that were especially slow to move to the side. Some cars totally ignored him. Other moved out of the way quickly. Amazingly, we got to the hospital in just 15 minutes, and Krishna and Kumar rushed the patient inside.

Inside, we found a dozen or so people lying on gurneys waiting to be admitted. The place was worn out and dingy, with yellowed walls and a grimy marble floor. Nurses clustered around a desk talking on landline telephones. There was none of the frantic action you see on the TV show ER. Which was a bad sign, I think. Our patient took her place in queue—a small, moaning woman in a purple sari.

Later, I got a picture inside the ER at Gandhi Hospital, one of the largest government hospitals in Hyderabad. Pretty bare bones.

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