Lost your arms? Here’s a band-aid

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    If a headache struck you on a local train or the spicy breakfast you had caused acidity, where would you go? We suggest the station master’s room at any station. 
    The medical aid boxes at stations on Mumbai’s suburban network are equipped to handle only minor aches and injuries, but they have nothing to help in case of an accident like last Saturday’s mishap at Ghatkopar station, where a 16-year-old lost her arms after falling off a train. 
    At close to 15 stations Mumbai Mirror team visited on Wednesday, these emergency medical aid boxes -- full of pills, lotions, injections, and bandages -- had not been used even once. It is obvious that these boxes are there only to fulfill compliance with a 2004 Bombay High Court ruling, which put the onus of providing medical aid to a person injured in a train accident on the concerned station master. 
    Though the medical aid boxes are crammed with 66 items, very few of them are of any use in the kind of accidents that take place on railway tracks. Dr Rita Savla, director of Radhee Disaster and Education Foundation, calls these medical aid kits a sham. 
    Dr Savla, who at one point was involved in training hamaals in administering emergency medical aid, said nearly half the items in the boxes can be done away with. “They have injections and IVs in the box. Who will administer in injections and IVs? And what is required in not there -- ice boxes to carry severed limbs, cervical collars to make sure the victims don’t suffer aggravated injuries when being transported to hospital, and gauzes of good quality to stem the flow of blood.” 
    Savla said the railways run fullfledged hospitals for its employees and they should align these with its trauma care programme at stations. “Their doctors should work closely with the station staff to improve facilities,” Savla said an untrained person helping an accident victim can cause more harm. Citing the example of ‘torniquet’, one of the items in the medical box, Savla said ‘torniquet’ is no longer used in trauma care worldwide. “It is a misconception that a torniquet is to be tied above a severed or injured limb tightly to prevent blood loss. In fact, it needs to be loosened every 30 seconds for fifteen seconds or else it can only aggravate the injury.” Dr Savla has organized a group of volunteers who want to train porters, station masters and cops, who regularly deal with accident victims, so as to minimise deaths. She has already held a workshop with Government Railway Police and hopes to conduct many more in future. —MMB