‘You feel omnipresent’: bringing city care to India’s country hospitals

Dr V Yatheendra, a surgeon at Taluk hospital in Bagepalli, checks on a patient. He can now consult specialists remotely at the tele-ICU hub Photograph: Elke Scholiers/The Guardian

Whenever an ambulance arrived with a critically ill patient, Dr R Mubarak’s heart would sink. His small country hospital in Bagepalli, like most rural government hospitals in India, had no intensive-care unit. Families had to take the patient, who was perhaps on the brink of death, on a two-hour drive to the general hospital in Bengaluru.

“Often the patient came back in the same ambulance, dead. They never made it,” says Mubarak. “I knew I could be signing their death warrant by sending them but I had no choice.”