At Sion hospital, a one-stop digital info centre eases the pain
Sahayata Centre uses photographs, computers and lots of care to help the bereaved. Now civic chief Johny Joseph wants to replicate it
Chitrangada Choudhury
A few minutes into 7 pm on 7/11, volunteer Kiran Ghorpode (21) was mid-way into his shift behind the counter of Sion Hospital’s fledgling Sahayata Centre, when a taxi driver rushed in a badly mutilated body.
It would be the first of over 100 men, killed or injured by bombs at nearby train stations, that the hospital would receive through the next couple of hours, as Mumbai went through its darkest day of terror in over a decade.
Housed in Sion Hospital’s Emergency Medical Service (EMS), the Sahayata Centre—conceived by 5 professionals brought together by their desire to ease the despair of relatives of the over 5,500 patients that the Sion EMS receives each month—is a well equipped one-stop information centre manned by empathetic staff.
Dr Kumud Golam, the hospital’s head anaesthesiologist; Bhavesh Patel, a social worker who’s spent the better part of his career helping Mumbai’s rail accident victims; Pranav Shah, a critical care expert practicing in 2 suburban private hospitals; Vidya Das, a doctor at EMS, and Shrikant Soman, an accountant at Mumbai’s Western India Turf Club, have worked on the project since last February, putting it through test runs from June 15. Terrible Tuesday put their project into use—four days later, the work behind the counter continues.
Ghorpode—he works as a painter with an oil PSU—and co-volunteers have been making calls to every family that came searching for a relative—the final of the hospital’s 46 blast fatalities, just a head and upper torso that was brought in around 3 am on Thursday evening from the Mahim station, must be identified, and handed over.
The centre’s team spent Tuesday night photographing every 41 of the blast dead that were brought to the hospital. They gave each remain a number, gathering the belongings in duly numbered plastic bags, ready to be handed over when a family reclaimed its dead.
Through Wednesday, they dealt with an uninterrupted rush of anxious relatives, taking them through the photographs of unidentified bodies at the centre’s flatscreen computers.
Says Patel: ‘‘It was unpleasant, but it ensured that the families hunting for the missing were spared the ordeal of wading through unidentified bodies at hospital morgues.’’
Das adds: ‘‘Faces had been left unrecognisable by the intensity of the blast. But on our screen, a relative was helped by the fact that we could zoom the photograph into other details—a victim got recognised by a mark of a bypass surgery, yet another by a ring on his finger.’’
If there was recognition, the centre’s staff routed them to the morgue, and explained official procedures that had to be carried out.
The team plans to introduce more measures, including colour coding to indicate a patient’s state (red if he is critical, and green if he’s stable) for relatives who might be formally illiterate.
‘‘Also, we want to make it a one-stop for donations,’’ says Shah, ‘‘since not every patient who deserves treatment can access it.’’
The project has been praised by no less than the Prime Minister, and now Mumbai’s civic chief Johny Joseph promises the BMC will replicate it in its hospitals. ‘‘That would be our true reward,’’ choruses the team.
URL- http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=193126