Delhi Metro turns saviour for ill passengers every day
NEW DELHI: Around 12.15pm on Thursday, when she was travelling by the metro, 32-year-old Piyali Mittra started sweating profusely through her palms and her body became cold as ice.
Within minutes, Mittra started feeling dizzy; the sounds around her seemed a distant echo.
She collapsed on the train floor and passengers surrounded her to help, before the driver was finally alerted.
All this happened while she was surrounded by around 50 passengers in the women’s coach in the Delhi Metro’s Samaypur Badli-huda City Centre line.
The next thing she remembers, she was being escorted by her friend and a metro staffer to the Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital in south Delhi.
“I don’t know what happened but before I reached the hospital, I started feeling better,” Mittra said. She de-boarded at the Mal- viya Nagar metro station and was immediately given first aid.
After a delay in the ambulance’s arrival , she was taken to the hospital in a private vehicle.
Every day, on an average, four to five such incidents of passengers requiring medical attention are reported from across stations, the Delhi Metro said.
On Thursday, six cases of medical emergencies, including Mittra’s case, were reported from the Delhi Metro network, all of which were i mmediately attended to.
A man felt uneasy at the Rajiv Chowk metro station and was rushed to Lady Hardinge Hospital. Three women were also found unconscious at different platforms and one man was found unconscious inside a train.
A day before, a 13-year-old girl had vomited inside the train heading towards Dwarka Sector 21 with traces of blood and was given immediate medical attention.
The Delhi Metro Rail Corpora- tion (DMRC) said a protocol is set in such situations and all employees are trained in first-aid at the time of induction and are able to handle such cases.
Each official has a mandatory session with medical experts at the Shastri Park Training Institute which includes giving artificial respiration, dressing wounds, handling injuries to bones, burns, stretcher exercise and transferring patients to hospitals. “In most cases, our response time is less than 10 minutes. Before this time, the patient is sent off to the nearest hospital for attention depending on how critical they are” a DMRC spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said first aid is provided and if that does not work, the passenger is transferred to a hospital.