New Delhi: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has issued a guidance document for the use of drones in healthcare to help state health authorities in the delivery of medical supplies using drones.
Apex Medical Research Institute has published this paper based on the field experience of Manipur and Nagaland. Measles, Mumps and COVID-19 Vaccines, Tablets and Capsules, Syrup in Bottles, Gloves, Syringes, Blood Bags, Clinical Biological Tissue, Urine, Blood, Sputum, Saliva with storage temperature between 2°C and 8°C Medical items such as or frozen samples can only be transported following this guidance.
“As a nation of 1.3 billion, we have faced many challenges in upgrading our healthcare system. The COVID pandemic added to the challenge, but also gave us an opportunity to revisit and fix some of the issues. With the advent of COVID-19 vaccines, ICMR envisages delivery of these vaccines to the inaccessible areas in India. ICMR Director General Prof Dr Balram Bhargava said that this guidance document will help in understanding the various nuances involved in planning and implementation of drone based medical supplies.
ICMR scientists in collaboration with Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA), Government of India, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Airports Authority of India (AAI) submitted this document in compliance with the new Drone Rules-2021, which highlights the . Drone selection, takeoff and landing site selection etc.
The scope of this document includes areas such as how to obtain regulatory approvals from competent authorities for different types of drones and to use air space to provide medical supplies limited to medicines, vaccines and surgical materials.
In addition, it outlines the criteria for choosing a suitable drone model for drones and take-off and landing points for drones and what types of medical supplies can be delivered via drones. The documents also describe how the carrier box is prepared, loading and unloading the carrier box, and checking the quality of medical supplies before and after flight. Most importantly, its paper detailed the human resource requirement and training needs of healthcare workers for drone-based delivery.
“First, we did dry-runs at IIT-Kanpur and then we started pilots in northern states like Manipur and Nagaland. The most important point to remember is the training of health workers in terms of data recording, management for analysis, validation purposes, handling of any unforeseen events during field operations. Apart from this, choosing the right type of drone and features are some of the important points that we have talked about. States can benefit from this paper,” said Dr Samiran Panda, Additional Director General, ICMR, which is also the principal investigation into the drone-based healthcare delivery project.
“Drone technology has the potential to revolutionize almost all areas of the economy and public welfare – such as medical delivery, search and rescue, agriculture and infrastructure development, law and order and national security to name a few,” said Amber Dubey, Secretary of the Joint Civil Aviation Ministry said in the document.