India can have its own disaster response model: Health Min
New Delhi: Stressing on the need to adopt best practices from the past few decades, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has on Tuesday said that India’s model can learn from the best global practices and could go beyond the Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) to become flexible and agile to deal with exigencies on the ground.
“Being a vast country with diverse terrains, India can have its own disaster response model which can be emulated by other countries,” Mandaviya said.
“While it is important to learn from global best practices and follow SOPs, let us learn from the national examples of emergency and disaster response in the past few decades and enrich our model from learning and insights from these,” he said while addressing the consultative workshop on ‘National Emergency Medical Team, India’.
“The multi-sectoral and multi-layered learning need to be incorporated in the training and capacity building modules of the national architecture of emergency response and management,” Mandaviya said.
The purpose of the two-day workshop is to bring together all stakeholders of the NEMT initiative to deliberate on the policy, strategy, roles and responsibilities of the initiative and prepare a roadmap for integrating the needs of the country for disaster preparedness aligning with the health needs during such situations, the ministry has said in an official statement.
Prevention of health emergencies, preparedness and responses form one of the priority areas under the G20 Health Track agenda and this is the first meeting after the G20 Health Working Group meeting in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram which took place from 18-20.
Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan emphasised the importance of collaboration between the NDMA, NDRF, state agencies, emergency service providers, trauma centres etc and stressed the need for synergizing efforts between them to ensure agility, rapid and effective response.