A constructive strategy planned

COVID-19 pandemic has stretched the healthcare infrastructure of the country to a great extent and burdened the entire healthcare sector across the globe. However, on a positive note, the last one year has helped increase collaboration in healthcare systems across the world. Never before has there been this vast knowledge sharing and community linkages to tackle the pandemic.
The last one-year has definitely improved our skills and made us prepared better for future emergencies. People also valued the efforts and contribution of healthcare workers and showed more respect to the sector, which uplifted the spirits of all to continue and fight the pandemic.

While we have approached 2021 with the good news of vaccines, our immediate priority is to get all our staff vaccinated and work alongside the system to ensure smooth implementation of the drive.

For 2021, we are looking at a constructive strategy to overcome the disruption caused by the pandemic. We are revisiting our health policies with a vision to come up with better solutions to ensure that there is efficient utilization of our limited financial resources.

On the technology front, we all know, equipment and technology are the lifeline of any hospital. And the industry has grown tremendously in the last decade with so many advancements and innovations.

As we are two super speciality hospitals in paediatrics and obstetrics and gynaecology, we are more dependent on the same in order to enable us to save more and more lives. We are focusing on supporting the Make in India campaign for biomedical equipment to help the local businesses and make healthcare more affordable for all.

Being public charitable hospitals, our focus has always been to utilize the available resources to the optimum and derive maximum benefit for our patients. We are also dependent on our donors for modern equipment, as there are many financial constraints. Also, together, in both the hospitals, we have over 50 super specialities and this makes it even more challenging, as each department has different requirements for diagnosis and treatment and are mostly independent of each other. We have state-of-the-art centres, established in the fields of paediatric cardiac surgeries, neuro surgeries, bone marrow transplant, laparoscopic surgeries, ART, and IVF. We also have one of the largest NICUs in the world, with 155 beds and modern infrastructure to support them.

Despite the many challenges during the COVID pandemic in 2020, we have been able to establish two isolation wards with state-of-the-art equipment for children and mothers. We were the first hospital to identify the cases of PMIS in India; we established a centre for pulverisation, molecular lab, and perinatology clinic in 2020.

Over the next year, with the whole COVID situation, our focus will continue to be more on essential life-saving equipment for fighting this pandemic, in our isolation wards, as well as strengthening some of our key departments such as NICU, PICU, cardiac OT, neuro OT, plastic surgery, gynaecology, and obstetrics departments. As the year progresses, we are also interested in setting up new programs such as a gait lab in orthopaedics, liver transplant, cochlear implants and heart transplants.

We are also looking forward to focus more on data driven equipment from an research and development perspective. We are looking forward to collaborations and opportunities to work with like-minded companies for the same. We are also in discussion with start-ups and look forward to supporting their innovations in the coming year, particularly in the field of mother and child health.
This is not the first and the last pandemic our country has seen, we need more focus and vigour in the healthcare sector collectively, across all the sectors, with special attention for the women and children, the elderly and the disabled.

I take this opportunity to thank the Medical Buyer Team for inviting me to write this guest column and congratulate them on the consistent and comprehensive updates on the healthcare industry, which I am finding very informative and useful.