Gopalganj: Dr. Abhishek Ranjan left his job at AIIMS to bring CPR training to Bihar’s Villages. While working at AIIMS, Dr. Ranjan met many patients who had travelled all the way to Bihar, even from his own village, Gopalganj, seeking treatment for respiratory and heart problems.
After three years of working at AIIMS, Dr. Ranjan decided to quit his job and go back to his village to help people in 2018.
He runs his own clinic on College Road and travels to far-away villages to teach people CPR techniques that could help them save someone’s life if they collapse or have a cardiac arrest.
CPR is an important skill because it can help save a person’s life before emergency responders or an ambulance arrives.
His CPR training is free and is usually attended by youth, villagers, police personnel, and community health workers.
According to the reports, Ranjan has trained more than 50,000 people across 18 districts of Bihar.
He pays for all the travelling and training expenses himself in hopes of helping people in remote villages respond more readily to medical emergencies.
Dr. Ranjan believes that people from his village and other villages of Bihar should be able to have access to better healthcare services like those in tier 1 cities.
Dr. Ranjan’s main concern was that many villages in Bihar are not properly connected to roads or are very far from the nearest healthcare facilities, so he wanted the villagers to be equipped with skills that can enable them to help someone in distress until an ambulance could reach them or for the time that is required for them to travel to a hospital.
The main mission of his CPR workshops is to prepare ordinary people for emergency situations, so that they are not left helpless or in a state of panic.
Dr. Ranjan is a resident of Koini village in Gopalganj’s Barauli block. His father is a farmer and a businessman.
He completed his early education at a private school in Patna, where the seed of his medical ambition was first planted. Watching the immense respect for his landlord, a local physician, deeply inspired him as a young student.
He did his postgraduate studies at a medical college in Cuttack and also worked in various departments at AIIMS.
In an interview with ETV Bharat, he said, “Seeing the respect accorded to our landlord, who was a doctor, inspired me to become one. After Class XII, I missed the cut-off by just 0.05 marks. But I did not give up and worked my way to where I am today.”
Dr. Ranjan started to teach CPR techniques during Covid because he met many young patients who had come to him seeking treatment for heart ailments. He became concerned about the rising cases of heart attacks in young adults during COVID.
Dr. Ranjan said that only 1.8 per cent of the Indian population knows how to perform CPR, which is far less than the 20 per cent of the population abroad.
His focus is on teaching people how to perform CPR during the earliest moments of a cardiac arrest. He also wants to improve health awareness in localities where such training is not available.
The campaign began at Motihari police station because Dr. Ranjan thought that training policemen to perform CPR is very crucial, since they are stationed at many places, markets and other crowded areas. CPR-trained police personnel can readily help anyone who is going through cardiac distress until emergency services arrive.
To bring awareness to households and rural communities, he is also training ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers and women associated with the Jeevika Programme.
Dr. Ranjan said that he receives no grants from the government and he pays for travel, accommodation, and venue for these workshops out of his own pocket.
According to the reports, he conducts training workshops at two villages every month, and the cost for the workshops reaches around Rs 20,000.
Dr. Ranjan said that juggling his medical career and the CPR training workshops was initially very hectic and financially straining for him. However, the backing from Bihar’s Director General of police and local administration helped him to keep the program alive.
(Rh/ARC)
