03 June 2010
“Everybody has dreams, but very few work towards making them come true. The department of Gastroenterology is only seven years old. It has to be credited for realising this dream.”
THE King Edward Memorial(KEM) Hospital in Parel has become the first public hospital in the city to offer both cadaveric and live liver transplants.
Inaugurating the facility in the Dr Mehta Lecture Hall on the hospital premises on Wednesday, Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray said,“Everybody has dreams, but very few work towards making them come true. The department of Gastroenterology is only seven years old. It has to be credited for realising this dream.”Mayor Shraddha Jadhav congratulated the hospital for making liver transplants possible for the poor.“A common man could not afford the exorbitant costs of liver transplant surgeries. But now this facility will benefit the poor not just in Maharasthra, but across the country,”she said.
While private hospitals charge anywhere between Rs 25–30 lakh for such a surgery, at KEM it costs only Rs 5 lakh. KEM Hospital dean Dr.
Sanjay Oak said,“Our costs will only be limited to the medicine charges. Patients will not have to pay for any other amenities. The first 100 surgeries will be even cheaper, as the Narotam Sekhsaria Trust has promised us to fund most of the Rs 5lakh fee.”
Padmashree Dr Arvinder Soin, who trained a 30–member team from the hospital in the intricacies of liver transplant surgery in Delhi, said,“Around 4% Indians suffer from Hepatitis B and 2% from Hepatitis C. As many as 200,000 people die every year in India due to liver failure.
We conducted 100 liver transplants last year in Gangaram Hospital in Delhi. Going by these figures, you can imagine the need for such a facility in Maharashtra.”Two state–of–the–art operation theatres (OT) have been constructed to meet the requirements of this new facility.
“Boasting of facilities like anti gas scavenging system and the class 1 laminar flow, our OT is also the first–of–itskind in a civic hospital,”said Dr. Avinash Supe, professor and head, gastrointestinal surgery department, at the GS Medical College of the KEM Hospital. The ICU has also been renovated.
Everybody has dreams, but very few work towards making them come true. The department of Gastroenterology is only seven years old. It has to be credited for realising this dream.
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