With a view to provide quality healthcare services to the patients suffering from genetic blood disorders, the Maharashtra State Blood Transfusion Council (MSBTC) recently launched an ambitious project to provide free prevention, detection and treatment options to the patients suffering from thalassaemia, haemophilia and sickle cell disease.

With a view to get a better understanding of this programme, the Maharashtra state government launched this project in four districts initially namely Thane, Satara, Nasik and Amaravati on a pilot basis. Through these districts they also aim to cater the nearby satellite towns and cities by bringing them under the ambit of this programme. It is understood that based on the final results of this project, which is currently underway in the said districts, the state government plans to extend it across the state to enable all the patients to enjoy the benefit from this scheme.

Under this scheme the state government has set up special day care centres in the selected cities through which they will be providing free detection services to the patients for which they have already acquired and installed world class detection tools aimed at helping the patients in timely detection of the disorder or this disease. Apart from that the state will also provide free blood transfusion, blood products, recombinant products and drugs like factor 8, factor 9, despheral etc, along with nursing care and awareness on  preventive measures to enable best patient services to the affected individual.

Maharashtra is the first state in the country to launch such a programme targeted to service thousands of patients suffering from these life long chronic disorders related to blood which is often too costly for the patients to treat. According to Dr Sanjaykumar Jadhav, assistant director, SBTC, Maharashtra, “With the help of state intervention, it is now possible to target a lot of patients who have not been able to afford the treatment available due to the huge cost associated with the same and also because they are usually out of reach. In the coming years we hope to change this situation for the better so as to make it more patient friendly so that maximum patients can be covered under this scheme.”

Dr Jadhav added that as per the recent statistics there are around 4000 detected cases of thalassaemia and haemophilia each in the state apart from around 5000 cases of sickle cell disease. “Considering the huge disease burden that is present in the state today, we want bring in and adopt an effective mechanism that will help us to detect more such cases effectively so as to root out and address this issue at the ground level,” added Dr Jadhav who is also an expert advisor in the panel member of the World Health Organisation (WHO).