Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, June 17: To provide better health care and quality medical facilities in rural areas, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Ghulam Nabi Azad launched Medical Mobile Unit (MMU) here today.
Azad said that the establishment of Mobile Medical Units is one of the innovative schemes which will provide health coverage to people living in the un-served and underserved remote areas in the state.
“In its effort to reach out to the people of far flung areas, we launched high-tech Medical Mobile Units (Ambulances) to treat patients, who, otherwise have to cover long distance to reach to the nearest health Centre,” Azad said.
Azad said: “There are many belts in the state where it takes a lot of time for the people to reach to the nearest Health Centre to avail medical facilities, especially in times of emergency. These mobile units equipped with lot of modern medical facilities will prove to be a boon in such areas.” He said that many precious lives could be saved by these units.
These Medical Mobile Units have all the important facilities like, X-Ray, ECG, Suction machine, Defreezer, Refrigerator, besides some other facilities. There is also a provision of Ultrasound facility in the Ambulance. “It is a kind of moving hospital in which there will be a doctor, para-medical staff and technicians,” he said.
These ambulances would be used in far flung areas of the State from where it is at times difficult to ferry patients to tertiary care hospitals. These ambulances are part of 2035 National Mobile Medical Units which are to be inducted in 431 districts of the country. J&K would be getting 11 such ambulances.
Out of these 11 Medical Mobile Units, seven have been sanctioned to Jammu region, while four kept for Kashmir division.
Meanwhile, the Union Health Minister said, the present government has done a lot to improve the health care facilities in the country.
“The Central Government has included J&K as a special category State under NRHM under which the funding pattern has been eased to 90:10 from the previous 75:25,” Azad said.
He also said new components are being added to Janani Suraksha Yojna to give more facilities to pregnant women and new born babies. He said now pre and post natal care and treatment to women at Government run hospitals would be provided free of cost.
“The new-born babies would be treated up to their first birthday free of cost,” he said.
Azad said these new features to the scheme would be started from J&K itself.
Outlining the broad features of NRHM, the Union Minister said BPL patients can be funded 100 percent treatment costs of life consuming diseases on the production of relevant papers.
Azad regretted that not many cases from J&K are received and asked the Chief Medical Officers to deploy staff to prepare documents of such patients so that these cases are submitted to Centre for funding.
Earlier, Shabir Ahmad Khan, Minister of State for Health also spoke on the occasion.
Follow our WhatsApp channel
