Officer Converts Old Train Car Into ‘Hospital On Wheels’ To Bring Healthcare To Remote India

Officer Converts Old Train Car Into ‘Hospital On Wheels’ To Bring Healthcare To Remote India

From a dusty plain in central India comes the story of a truly brilliant solution to a significant problem.

Brought to light in a report from the Better India, a railway manager has found a masterful way to bring much needed medical services to the vast network of railway employees and their families: by building a hospital in a train coach.

If you go to Wikipedia and look up the city of Bhusuwal, the first thing you see is an image of Bhusuwal Junction, the city’s train station. Indicative of what this story is about, the junction is one of the busiest railway depots not just in central India, but the entire country.

It houses the Bhusuwal Railway Division, whose manager is Ity Pandey, a 26-year veteran of one of the world’s most used and most complicated rail networks.

Much like an old Rustbelt factory town, Bhusuwal Junction is the best source of employment for locals, and the division contains thousands of workers who live for most of the year in the middle of nowhere in order to maintain the lines which bisect the subcontinent.

For these employees and their families, medical care was the matter of a long journey.

“I conceived the idea of a ‘hospital on wheels’ because we wanted to provide medical aid to our injured employees,” Pandey told the Better India.

“With more than 25,000 railway workers and their families spread across vast, remote areas, many did not have access to the essential healthcare or timely diagnoses needed to prevent worsening health issues. The remoteness of these areas, coupled with the shortage of medical professionals, aggravated the problem.”

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Equipping an old first-class train carriage with an ECG station, blood collection and lab equipment, OBGYN facilities, and treatment rooms, the carriage, painted white and festooned with flowers, now crisscrosses the Bhusuwal Railway Division in Maharashtra state, providing medical care to the vast regiment of railway workers.

Every patient treated or examined on the carriage, called “Rudra,” is assigned a unique ID which creates a patient file at the Divisional Railway Hospital in Bhusuwal. If the patient needs a follow-up that can’t wait for the Rudra to come around again, they can visit the city and skip the diagnostics and paperwork.

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“In just one day, Rudra delivered essential healthcare services to 259 beneficiaries, including 159 employees, 72 family members, and 25 retired workers,” Pandey said. Anemia and high-blood sugar were common ailments.