The Indian Railways will soon establish 18 new medical colleges attached to the existing Railway hospitals through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) programme. These proposed medical colleges will be opened in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bilaspur, Lucknow, Barasat, Bhubaneshwar, Mysore, Kharagpur, Guwahati, Dibrugarh, Jodhpur, Gardenreach, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, B R Singh Hospital/Kolkata, Bhopal, Jammu and Thiruvanthapuram.

The Railways will also establish seven Nursing Colleges attached to existing Railway Hospitals through the PPP programme. These places are Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai (Kalyan), Chennai, Secunderabad, Lucknow and Jabalpur. Railways also propose to set up a training institute at Dankuni (West Bengal).

Besides, the Railways has also decided to establish medical facilities in long distance trains. This First Aid facilities will be provided for travelling passengers in all the long distance trains. Proposals to depute a doctor on few long distance trains, having practically no stoppages en-route is under process. All long distance passenger carrying trains are provided with First Aid Boxes containing essential drugs and dressing materials. The First Aid Box is available with the Guard of the train.

In addition, augmented First Aid Boxes with wider range of medicines, disposable medical material etc have been provided with the Train Superintendents of Rajdhani/Shatabdi Express trains and Guards of other nominated trains.

Services of doctors travelling as passengers are also utilized to attend to passengers who are in need of urgent medical assistance. The frontline staff like Train Superintendents, Train Conductors, Travelling Ticket Examiners etc. ate also trained in rendering first aid. Trains can also make unscheduled halts, if necessary, at the stations en-route in emergencies. The Station Masters have details of doctors, clinics and hospitals, both Government and private, in the vicinity of the station, so that their services could be availed in emergencies. In addition, a database has also been developed regarding availability of the non-railway medical facilities along railway tracks and at stations en-route for providing emergency medical care to sick passengers in the trains.