The Hindu Business Line : Heritage offers elder care assistants programme

INCREASING pressures of lifestyle forcing people to seek help forhome care nursing assistants has opened the vista in Bangalore for the Hyderabad-based Heritage Elder Care Services (HECS) to try its experiment here.

Announcing the launch of its centre here on Thursday, Mr K.R. Gangadharan, Managing Director, Heritage Hospitals, said by 2050, 77 million of the total Indian population were expected to be in the 60 years age, who would require the critical minimum nursing care.

Heritage Hospitals, which provides facility for elderly patients, realised from its experience of a decade that hospital was not a place for long-term care for geriatrics. Thus was born the idea of home care nursing assistance (HCNA) programme in 1995, said Mr Gangadharan.

After having fine-tuned the programme in Hyderabad, where Heritage Hospitals has a 100-bed hospital, Mr Gangadharan felt it could be launched in other cities and Bangalore was chosen as the second centre outside Andhra Pradesh. It has its branch in Chennai.

As the programme could be managed by non-medical staff trained to check temperature, blood pressure, clean and dress patients, offer feeding, administer drugs as instructed by the family members, Heritage Hospitals has partnered with local branch of the Livelihood Advancement Bedside Services (LABS), an organisation run by Dr Reddy's Labs of Hyderabad, to identify youth from slums and train them in Bedside Assistance Service (BAS). It has already trained 1,000 persons to run the programme to meet the growing needs for such assistance.

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