10BedICU project inauguration in Manipur

In collaboration with the 10BedICU project, we are excited to announce a 10-bed ICU and India’s first Tele-ICU hub at Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences (JNIMS) hospital, in the state of Manipur! The key figures present to inaugurate this historic event included: the Chief Minister of the State of Manipur, Nongthombam Biren Singh, the 10BedICU co-founder and project leader Srikanth Nadhamuni, and the principle donor, Vinod Khosla. 

Manipur is one of eight program states in the much larger 10BedICU project aimed at improving critical care infrastructure in rural India. The project was launched last year, and the other program states include: Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim, Meghalaya, and Assam. In addition to the main hub at JNIMS, the Hamilton Medical India team has provided and installed HAMILTON-C1 ventilators in 16 district hospitals across Manipur, which will work in tandem with the project’s pandemic management technology platform. This technology will also help in rolling out Tele-ICU compatibility across districts, and JNIMs, the state tertiary hospital, represents the country's first Tele-ICU hub.

Launched in response to the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, 10BedICU is a project developed in partnership with State governments, NGOs, and donors to create ICU infrastructure in rural government hospitals. Through the 10BedICU project, Manipur is one of eight states across the country that will receive state-of-the-art ICU medical equipment, pandemic/ICU management software, and a TeleICU module connecting rural hospitals to a centralized hub at a tertiary hospital or medical college with online specialists. The project attempts to address 5 gaps in critical care service delivery in rural India:

1. To overcome the lack of ICU facilities in rural areas
2. To immediately overcome the lack of human resources for running the ICU
3. To provide proper coordination between administrations and health systems
4. To provide capacity building of doctors and nurses by facilitating the development of training modules and online courses on covid management, ICU protocols and more
5. Adopt communization as an implementation strategy to ensure better governance of the facility and long term sustatinabilty

Manipur is a topographically and ethnically diverse state in northeast India. With its often sparsely populated, remote, and far-flung areas, it poses unique critical care service challenges and supply gaps that have been accentuated due to the COVID related health crisis. As one of the severely affected states during the second wave of the pandemic, the 10BedICU project aims to address the lack of critical care infrastructure and to improve the critical care services in Manipur.

Learn more about this inspiring project here and watch the video below.