“Go and train one in every family”, was the appeal made by Dr.Abdul Kalam to the Not-for-Profit organization Alert, almost a decade ago.
The training Dr.Kalam wanted Alert to take it to the masses was Emergency Medical care. He wanted people to know about administering first aid at the Golden Hours.
Golden Hours are a crucial period between the time of an emergency (an injury due to an accident or a serious health threat) and the time taken to reach a hospital, where every minute must be properly utilized to save the lives of people.
In the process of fulfilling Dr.Kalam’s wish and command, Alert launched its service in 2006, and on Wednesday, it launched its first-ever ‘Golden Army’ in Coimbatore at the prestigious PSG College of Arts and Science.
‘Golden Army is a unique initiative of Alert to create a community of responsible and responsive good Samaritans with knowledge of first aid and response during emergencies,’ according to Alert.
The focus here is to provide authentic emergency medical care training to PSG students of the Golden Army Chapter, so that they can help anyone in need of it, and also explain to them about the Samaritan Law.
The Law allows any person to administer immediate assistance or emergency care to a person who needs emergency medical attention. It protects the volunteers, commonly called ‘Good Samaritans’ from harassment on the actions being taken by them to save the life of the road accident victims.
Alert has 15 years of expertise in training people in this specific domain, and it has trained 1.5 lakh people so far (out of which 1.3 lakh are youth), and it plans to have a good no.of volunteers in Coimbatore soon.
A MoU was exchanged between PSG CAS and Alert by D.Brindha, Principal, PSG CAS and V.M.Muralidharan, Chairman of Alert in the presence of Prof.Kaliraj, VC of Bharathiar University, L.Gopalakrishnan, Managing Trustee, PSG Institutions, Dr.J.S.Bhuvaneswaran, Director, PSG Super Specialty Hospital, Rajesh Trivedi and Kala Balasundaram, Co-founders of Alert.
The Chief Guest, Dr.Sameeran, District Collector shared that prior to two-and-a-half months, an alliance was made in his presence between PSG Super Specialty Hospital and Alert, and in the next two-and-a-half months another alliance has been forged by the two entities. He added that Coimbatore has more than 10 lakh ration card holders (meaning that if each family has 3, the number rises to a greater level), and if one person in each family gets trained, the outcomes would be phenomenal.
At the event, Karl Marx, Trainer from Alert easily made demonstrations about checking vitals, blood circulation, identifying obstruction in airways and a lot more useful stuff to the students who would become Golden Warriors in future.