Road tomography

They are trying to reduce the mortality rate from road accidents through the purchase of expensive equipment.

Five federal hospitals and several dozen district and city hospitals will receive additional equipment and subsidies for the technical modernization of their emergency departments under the state program for improving medical care for victims of road accidents. The corresponding government decree was signed the other day. Now we know exactly how much money will be allocated to each region. In total, it is planned to allocate about 9 billion rubles from the federal budget for the implementation of this project over the next three years. As Olga Krivonos, director of the medical care department of the Ministry of Health and Social Development, said yesterday, the department expects to use these roadside investments to reduce road deaths by 1.5 times .

For the first time, the need to allocate additional financial allocations to save people injured on the roads was discussed at the government level at the end of last year . The reason was the terrible mortality statistics on the most important federal highways. On the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway alone, which passes through the Moscow, Tver, Novgorod and Leningrad regions, about 4 thousand people die annually. In February 2008, the Ministry of Health and Social Development approved a list of equipment that will be used to “strengthen” the hospitals closest to the “roads of death”, and described exactly how localities should prepare to receive valuable equipment. Thus, hospitals of federal, regional, regional and republican subordination included in the program will have to receive 11 types of equipment. The procurement list includes a neuroradiosurgery device necessary to minimize blood loss during brain surgery, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, an X-ray computed tomograph, ultrasound diagnostic equipment, a ventilator and anesthesia device. District and municipal hospitals should receive only six types of new equipment.

The new equipment was initially planned to equip hospitals located in close proximity to federal highways, including the most “backward” in terms of equipment. No one there had ever seen a tomograph that costs several million, which means the specialist had to be sent to Moscow or another large city to study. The training lasts at least three months, and the same amount of time is needed to learn how to use the device fluently.

Of course, federal health care facilities know how to handle equipment, and the supplies will not be useless. Thus, federal hospitals in Obninsk and Novovoronezh, as well as Moscow Clinical Hospital No. 85, receive almost 100 million rubles this year. as targeted subsidies from the budget. A Research Institute of Neurosurgery named after Academician N.N. Burdenko - more than 201 million rubles.

Ten regions will receive subsidies from the federal budget, the amount of which depends on the real danger that the roads of a given territory pose to citizens. Thus, the Rostov region will receive the most this year - 263 million rubles. Next behind it is the Krasnodar Territory - 251 million rubles. Moscow and St. Petersburg will be provided with a total of 99.9 million each. The purchase of special ambulances, which will be on duty in close proximity to dangerous sections of roads, will be financed separately. True, only 15 new cars will be bought for the entire country, which cannot but affect the speed of their arrival at accident scenes. But in themselves they fully meet all modern requirements. “These are fundamentally different from ordinary ambulances,” Professor Arkady Vertkin, head of the National Scientific and Practical Society of Emergency Medical Services, told Vremya Novostey. - They are equipped with all the most modern means of immobilization (fixation) of victims - gurneys, stretchers. They have a range of effective pain relievers, vital sign monitors, an electrocardiograph and much more.”

The new technology is very important, doctors from several trauma departments of capital hospitals, with whom the Vremya Novostey correspondent was able to contact, are confident. But, according to the experts interviewed, in order to reduce the negative consequences of road injuries, the issue must be posed more broadly. “There is no emergency traumatology anywhere in the world except our country,” one of the doctors told Vremya Novostey. According to him, fractures, the most common injury in road accidents, require surgical treatment in 99% of cases, but due to the lack of surgeons and operating rooms, victims are treated conservatively. In addition, the Compulsory Health Insurance Fund does not pay for consumables, which are often required in traumatology. The so-called ham nail, which is used to fasten large bones after a fracture, costs 70 thousand rubles. And without them, patients, at best, linger in hospital beds for several months.

Galina PAPERNAYA