A GPS-enabled medical van in Ranchi. Telegraph picture

The movement of 101 mobile medical units can now be tracked on GPS, making them accountable to the state if they miss going to remote villages.

In Jharkhand, though mobile vans have been around for a few years, there was no way of knowing whether they actually ventured to the villages they were supposed to.

This April, Jharkhand Rural Health Mission Society got 101 vans fitted with GPS trackers. Under the ambit of National Rural Health Mission and renamed National Medical Mobile Units (NMMU), they ran on pilot basis from April to July. Since August, all technical glitches have now been ironed out across 24 districts and vehicle movements are getting recorded and stored at respective district headquarters.

“Thanks to the GPS, we can track if a van went to its respective location or not. It is very easy to track and highly dependable,” said Akay Minz, state programme coordinator of Jharkhand Rural Health Mission Society, the mother body to monitor the movement of vehicle.

Mahesh Kumar, district programme manager of Ranchi, who heads the NMMU monitoring unit in the district, said: “I can track movements of medical units on my laptop. Going by national rules of running mobile medical units, route charts of all such vehicles are prepared at least a year before. All I am required to do is to sit at least once a day and check if the mobile units followed the routes or not,” he said.

It’s a mammoth task to get the medical units running on rural roads, dirt tracks, Naxalite-hit areas, forested and hilly tracts and so on. Not surprising, several NGOs have been roped across the state to run the vehicles.

Medical units service rural areas on a roster basis 22 days a month. Each unit has an eight-member team — physician, pharmacist, lab technician, X-ray technician, auxiliary nurse-cum-midwife (ANM), helper, driver and conductor.

GPS information on routes comes to each district programme manager. For instance, on Monday, the nearest van in Ranchi was tracked at Pahan Toli in Hotwar, 15km from the city. “Going by the route chart, this particular medical unit is doing fine. It is run by Ranchi Trust Hospital in Kathal More,” Mahesh said, displaying the advantages of having relevant information at his fingertips.

Neel Ranjan, who heads the mobile medical unit operations for the entire state, said more needed to be done.

“We are planning to introduce a system through which we can check online the total number of patients each vehicle attended. We are developing a centralised monitoring unit in Namkum where movements of vehicles can be tracked and recorded at one point,” he said.