Hands of God

If you’ve ever been inside a hospital for longer than 15 minutes, you probably know that to be in the emergency room requires a lot of skills. Which is why when Apollo Hospitals’ Home Healthcare CEO, Dr Mahesh Joshi, was awarded a lifetime achievement award for his contribution to building up emergency medical services (EMS) in India, you know he deserved it.

Born in a Marwari family in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, and graduating from the Amravati University in 1991, Dr Joshi’s passion to work with EMS began while on assignment as a doctor at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre. “In 1999, I was sent on an assignment to the Enron Power Project, where there were about 20,000 people working,” Dr Joshi says, “Conventionally, as doctors, we’re very protected in hospitals, with 50 people to respond and so many specialists, but when you’re away on field, you’re basically the hand of God for these people. And when you handle such cases and see positive outcomes, that’s the best gratification that any doctor can get out of being a physician.”

After learning more about EMS from US paramedics and a year’s observership at a hospital in New York, he realised India severely lacked such services. “At that point, there was no formal training, no certification, no process in place... but this was coming out of a desire to save lives, so that’s when I decided to start working towards building this space,” he says.

Joining Apollo Hospitals in 2001, he soon realised that making changes in the public healthcare system would take years. “We started doing a training programme ourselves,” he says about the solution. “The College of Emergency Medicine in UK got to know about it in 2005. They came down, did an audit of what we were doing and proposed we start a three-year programme with them and it would give a certificate that was recognised worldwide.”

He also helped set up the Society for Emergency Medicine in India to help promote EMS in 1999, which grew from 15 members to 1,500 over the past 16 years. Their efforts finally paid off, with the Medical Council of India implementing an MD (Doctor of Medicine) in Emergency Medicine in 2010, and the National Board of Examinations creating a Diplomate of National Board (DNB) last year.

EMS in India, however, still has a long way to go, with the public healthcare system having a long way to catch up with private hospitals, he says.

“Statistics tell us that there is an alarming need for emergency medical personnel,” he says. “Every four minutes, there is a road accident, 3,000 people die of heart attacks, and 50,000 people annually die of dog bites... for all of these, we need more than just conventionally trained physicians,” and adds that community outreach programmes also contribute to having a better emergency response from the general public. Dr Joshi also says that dealing with such stress every day can take its toll on doctors, and while they do learn from the negative cases and cherish the positive ones, he has another hobby that helps him keep cool — he’s a professional singer! “Being in art keeps the human being alive in me.”