BMJ Awards South Asia 2016: how to find the best in South Asian healthcare

The rugged Leh district, in the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, has a remarkable healthcare story. Until a few years ago its people had no access to specialist healthcare—anything other than basic care required an arduous and expensive 400 km journey to Srinagar, the state’s capital, or to New Delhi, which is over 1200 km away.

But since 2013 Leh’s people have benefited from an annual camp run by doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. The team includes orthopaedic surgeons who have been conducting complex procedures, such as total knee arthroplasty and hip replacement, at Leh’s Sonam Norboo Memorial Government Hospital for less than Rs100 000, a fraction of the cost elsewhere.

Sumit Anand, a research fellow in the orthopaedics department at AIIMS, said that before these camps people might have spent almost Rs500 000 on knee or hip replacement surgery because the patient would have to travel to a tertiary hospital in another city. Most people in the Ladakhi region of the state had no option but to live with the pain of their condition.

Speaking to The BMJ from Leh, Chandra Shekhar Yadav, professor of orthopaedics at AIIMS and the surgeon leading the project, said that initially the hospital had inadequate infrastructure for specialist procedures. “We had to transport all the components required. We airlifted almost 1000 kg of implants and other equipment for the camps,” he said.