‘You feel omnipresent’: bringing city care to India’s country hospitals

With no intensive care available in remote areas, many patients died on their way to city hospitals. Now rural medics are using tele-ICU systems to save lives

• Photographs by Elke Scholiers for the Guardian

Whenever an ambulance arrived with a critically ill patient, Dr R Mubarak’s heart would sink. His small country hospital in Bagepalli, like most rural government hospitals in India, had no intensive-care unit. Families had to take the patient, who was perhaps on the brink of death, on a two-hour drive to the general hospital in Bengaluru.

“Often the patient came back in the same ambulance, dead. They never made it,” says Mubarak. “I knew I could be signing their death warrant by sending them but I had no choice.”

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