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Bihar plans mandatory nurse training, tele-ICU hubs to strengthen critical care services
Bihar plans mandatory ICU nurse training, tele-ICU hubs, and GPS hospital mapping to enhance critical care services following Supreme Court guidelines.
PATNA The Bihar health department has planned mandatory intensive care unit (ICU) nurse training, tele-ICU hubs, GPS mapping of hospitals and stricter staffing norms to strengthen intensive care services across the state. The action was taken in line with an expert consultation following the Supreme Court’s latest guidelines, officials said on Thursday.
The experts identified five key manpower priorities, led by mandatory induction training for all ICU nurses before deployment. The Bihar Nursing Council will prepare a skill-based training roadmap, while nursing curricula are proposed to be upgraded to better equip graduates to manage critically ill patients.
The health department also proposed a statewide ICU specialist gap assessment to identify shortages of intensivists and develop short and medium-term critical care certification programmes. Efforts would also be made to increase postgraduate seats in ICU-related specialities in medical colleges.
In addition, the plan includes training healthcare workers on standardised ICU referral protocols for timely admission, establishing tele-ICU hubs to connect remote hospitals with specialists for real-time consultation and simplifying standardised ICU documentation to reduce unnecessary paperwork while maintaining proper patient records.
The consultation proposed a GPS-based hospital directory categorising ICU facilities into level-I, II and III, enabling identification of nearest critical care centre. Besides, hospitals with over 40 beds will have to register ICU facilities on Clinical Establishments portal, while smaller hospitals will register via a health department portal under development.
The roadmap also calls for preventive maintenance schedules for ICU equipment, stronger infection surveillance and reporting systems, dedicated ICU human resource guidelines with staffing ratios linked to bed strength and workload, and biomedical waste management protocols tailored to different ICU levels.
District health authorities, under supervision of civil surgeons, will inspect hospitals using a concise checklist based on National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) standards for ICU facilities. The availability and categorisation of ICU services across Bihar will also be published for accessibility and emergency referrals.
Officials said the meeting, chaired by Bihar’s former health secretary Lokesh Kumar Singh (since shifted) on April 29, concluded with consensus on the feasibility of the guidelines and agreement to fast-track measures that strengthen ICU services and compliance monitoring across the state.
The consultation, attended by senior officials, representatives of the Indian Medical Association, Bihar, and experts from government and private hospitals, aimed to prepare an action plan for implementing the SC-mandated “Guidelines for Organisation and Delivery of Intensive Care Services”, issued on April 20, 2026.
