National Emergency Life Support Courses Launched For Doctors

Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Bharati Pravin Pawar has launched National Emergency Life Support (NELS) courses for healthcare professionals, nurses and paramadics.

The course has been introduced to mitigate the dependency of the doctors on the foreign modules which are expensive and limited in nature.

This programme also includes developing training infrastructure in all States and UTs to implement the NELS course and creating a cadre of trainers to train doctors, nurses and paramedics working in emergency departments of the hospitals and ambulance services.

“Realizing the Prime Minister’s policy of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, the NELS provides standardised curriculum which is based on Indian context and developed in India”, the minister stated.

Pawar highlighted that the government is committed to continuous strengthening of delivery of Covid-19 and non-Covid essential health services, with the medium to a long-term goal of enhancing preparedness capacities to manage medical emergencies and thus minimise loss of precious lives.

“Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has always emphasised on providing affordable and best quality health services to the citizens. It is the need of the hour that India embarks on creating a world-class, efficient, professional and integrated system, enabled by technology, for the care of any victim of an accident, emergency or trauma in any part of the country,” she said.

Talking about the National Health Policy of 2017, she said that it envisaged the creation of a unified emergency response system, linked to a dedicated universal access number, with a network of emergency care, provision of life support ambulances and trauma management centres.

Pawar further added, “To keep pace with technological advancements, parallel efforts are needed for human resource development by equipping doctors, nurses and paramedics working in emergency departments of hospitals. The training should also be imparted to those providing pre-hospital care with standardised life-saving skills, to minimize mortality due to all types of medical emergencies in the country.”

Meanwhile, minister urged the states to send proposals for establishing NELS skill centres at their medical colleges and urged all skill centers to ensure that trainings are not only operationalised but also utilised to the maximum extent to improve the quality of emergency care services in the State.

She also requested Disaster Management Cell to regularly interact with participating institutions and monitor their activities to make this a successful initiative.

Activities Under The NELS

There are various activities that entails the NELS, including developing emergency life support training modules for doctors, nurses and paramedics after experts’ consultations and based on the Indian context, setting up and equipping skill centres in medical colleges under centre and states to impart skill-based training on emergency life support for all categories of health functionaries, 120 skills centres to be established in FY 2021-26 out of which 90 skill centres are in various stage of development.

Pool Of Trained Doctors

This initiative will lead to creation of a pool of trained doctors, nurses and paramedics in the country with skills to provide standardised emergency life support and reduce mortality due to medical emergencies. This will contribute to overall disaster preparedness and response capacities in providing emergency clinical care.

NELS course is comprehensive and deals with the management of medical emergencies, surgical emergencies, cardiac emergencies, respiratory emergencies including ventilator management protocol for COVID-19 and other disease, trauma-related emergencies, obstetric emergencies, paediatric emergencies, Snake bites, poisoning.