NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

GNRC (formerly known as Guwahati Neurological Research Centre) today unveiled plans to initiate air ambulance and medical outreach programme using helicopters to remote areas of North-east India. The service will regularly ferry doctors from GNRC to difficult-to-access locations across the region and provide doorstep medical support to the population across the North-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.

The announcement was made in Guwahati today at a press conference organized to mark the completion of six months of GNRC’s North Guwahati campus. The first of its kind super specialty healthcare facility in the entire North East, the 300-bedded hospital is equipped with state-of-the-art diagnostic and treatment facilities. GNRC provides ultra-low-cost services such as doctors’ consultation for USD 1-2 (one-two); blood sugar test for 35 (thirty-five) cents, Thyroid Profile for USD 3 (three); CT Scan for USD 15 (fifteen) and MRI for USD 42 (forty-two).

‘The hospital has received enormous response in the first six months of its operations and is presently receiving up to 200 out-patients every day, said Dr. Nomal Chandra Borah, CMD of GNRC Hospitals Ltd.

GNRC Medical was recently chosen by the World Bank Group (WBG), through its India Development Marketplace (IDM) initiative, to receive a grant of US$150,000. ‘The grant and tailor-made capacity development program by the World Bank Group (WBG) will help us to scale up our operating model and bridge the gap between healthcare requirement and availability,’ said Dr. Borah. ‘We intend to set up ten more hospitals in the region and beyond, within the next five years’, he concluded.