Hyderabad and Traffic Jams

V L Srinivasan
Hyderabad, April 20

Guess the time an ambulance takes to shift a person within a radius of 10 km of a major hospital during an emergency in Hyderabad ? It is around 45 minutes during rush hour and 15-20 minutes during non peak hours.
In medical parlance, the first hour of a patient falling sick is described as `Golden Hour" and his/her survival chances will be 80 percent if proper treatment is provided during that period.
Fortunately, most of the ambulances are equipped with ventilators and carry other emergency medicines so that the patient sustains till he reaches the the hospital. If not, scores of deaths would take place on the roads caught in traffic jams !
It is not that the roads are full of potholes or inefficiency on part of the hospital staff but the bumper-to-bumper traffic choking the main thoroughfares, scores of traffic signals jotting the twin cities and also the serpentine road dividers that cause the delay.
Added to the misery is the lack of public awareness about the emergency and the traffic police personnel's indifferent attitude in asking the motorists including heavy vehicles like buses to give way to the ambulances.
Even if the traffic police try to make way for siren blaring ambulances, the two-wheeler drivers are in a hurry and try to use the space to zoom past these vehicles.
When this correspondent travelled in an ambulance of Apollo Hospitals from Jubilee Hills to Vikrampuri in Kharkhana to pick up an elderly patient, it took 30 minutes to traverse a distance of 13 km. The traffic was minimum as the temperature was around 40 degrees Celsius.
In the return direction, the vehicle travelled an additional 2 km and the time it took to reach Jubilee Hills was 40 minutes as a Congress `neta' was going to Secunderabad Cantonment Board in a procession and the driver had to take a detour of 2 km to cross the road due to road dividers and also due to traffic snarls at Rasoolpura cross roads and Punjagutta cross roads.
In another instance, the call centre of EMRI received a message that an autorikshaw driver met with an accident on the bund of Bairamalguda water tank on Satoshnagar-Nagarjunasagar road at 8.04 p.m. on April 16.
The message was conveyed to the ambulance stationed at the sports stadium
at L B Nagar. Logically speaking, the ambulance shoud reach the place, which is just half a km, within a minute but it took five minutes as its way was blocked by an APSRTC bus, two wheelers, seven-seater autos and pedestrians crossing the road.
``The number of vehicles are multiplying faster than human beings and as a result, the roads are choc-a-bloc with automobiles and there is no room for any ambulance to travel fast during rush hour,'' Dr Mahesh Joshi, who is Consultant and Head of Emergency Medicine of Apollo Health City, told Express.
According to him, the public behaviour should change and more number of satellite health centres be opened so that the patients need not travel for too long. The Apollo Hospitals has a fleet of 15 big ambulances but not all patiuents are brought to Jubilee Hills. They will be taken to the hospital's centres in various localities and the average time taken is 15-17 minutes.
Even the Emergency Medical Research Institute, which has 27 ambulances in the twin cities and Cyberabad is planning to add more vehicles as shifting the sick to hospitals located at distant places is becoming a major problem.
According to EMRI regional manager M S R Swaroop, a public awareness video campaign will be launched soon in which Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy will appeal to the public to give way to ambulances.
``Most of the car drivers cannot hear the siren as the glass windows are closed and they would be listening to music from their audio systems,'' complains EMRI driver Venkat Rao.
Agreeing with him, supervisor of ambulance wing in Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences Srinivas Reddy said that most of the two wheeler drivers get irked at the blaring sirens of the ambulances and enter into heated exchanges with the staff.