The future of super specialty hospitals in Tier-II and Tier-III cities

Today as the world stresses on economic growth, globalization, and privatization, a silent section of the society seems to slip through all safety nets. In India, one is talking about at least 26 percent of the population that fits into this category. The percentage varies from state to state. In most of the northern states, poverty seems to be increasing and if you further disaggregate from urban to rural, you will find that 40 percent of the rural population in 10 states in India is below the poverty line. If one further disaggregates the figures into scheduled caste, scheduled tribes, the marginalized, etc., the percentages just keep on rising. So we have to accept the fact that there is a segment in our society, and we are talking about 260 million Indians, who is surviving with the burden of disease, estimated at around USD 30 billion, constituting 5 percent of GDP.

Some unfortunate statistics reflect this state of affairs:

• One quarter of hospitalized Indians slip below the poverty line because of hospital expenses alone.
• Hospitalized Indians spend more than half of their annual expenditures on healthcare.
• More than 40 percent of those hospitalized borrow money or sell assets to cover expenses.
• The poorest 20 percent Indians have more than twice the rate of mortality, malnutrition, and fertility of the richest 20 percent.

Even after 77 years of independence, as a country, we are unfortunate that we have been unable to provide quality tertiary healthcare services, especially emergency tertiary care like services for heart attack, or for patients suffering from trauma or neuro surgical problems in rural and small-town India, the Bharat as we call it. Residents in this part of the nation must travel even from district places to big cities for treatment of trauma or heart attacks.

We studied this evolution of healthcare very closely and realized the huge need for emergency medical facilities, especially during the golden hour, which is the time that the patient’s chances of survival are greatest if they receive care within the short period of time after a severe injury. To complement this effort further, we institutionalized centers for excellence in intensive care, neurology, cardiology, and trauma, to unlock the golden door of quality and speedy medical service.

Ujala Cygnus Healthcare Services is one of the best super specialty hospital chains in Tier-II and Tier-III cities across five states of Northern India with 21 hospitals at 19 locations, namely, Agra, Bahadurgarh, Delhi, Haldwani, Jammu, Kaithal, Kanpur, Karnal, Kashipur, Kurukshetra, Moradabad, Panipat, Prayagraj, Rewari, SitarGanj, Sonepat, Srinagar, and Varanasi, offering 2500+ NABH accredited beds across 22 super specialties.

Coming from a humble background as a child of refugees, I was deeply moved by some personal stories of relatives and friends unable to access healthcare in emergencies due to financial or geographical reasons, and thus had a vision of providing high-quality low-cost healthcare to communities that do not have access or were underserved. As a believer in socio-economic justice and economic equilibrium, I believe in strengthening rural India by making it my life’s mission to dissociate access to high-quality healthcare access from financial, social, and geographical status.

For 2024, we have the mission to expand to farthest corners of North India and institutionalize at least 30 units of medical excellence till 2025. From the current five states, we plan to expand to Odisha, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan in the near future.

We are already in the process of opening of two hospitals at Jharsuguda and Bhadrak. Patients have to travel 340+ km from Jharsuguda to Bhubaneshwar as there is currently no super specialty hospital in the city. Our planned hospitals will provide access to the underserved population in both these cities. We are also going to expand more hospitals near our already existing ones like Varanasi, where high medical demand exists due to concentrated populations and low healthcare penetration. For example, a district like Jaunpur has a population of more than 50 lakh but has abysmal tertiary healthcare facilities.

We have introduced specialty domains like cardiac surgery, organ transplants, and oncology in our services recently and would replicate the same to all our existing and upcoming centers by the end of 2024. We are enroute to install best-in-class operation theater suites at our hospitals in order to scale up cardiac surgery and onco-surgery services at all our 21 locations, up from the three hospitals we are offering them at currently. We have partnered with one of the best oncology care providers to collaborate, scale up, and upscale medical and radiation oncology services in Ujala Cygnus Healthcare.

Also in order to provide primary medical care services and awareness, we are planning to run our pet project Sehat Chaupal, the health community village outreach program every day at all our locations with a motive to not only provide medical checkup but also to make people aware about the prevalent diseases so as to improve the health-seeking behavior of the community and to prioritize preventive primary healthcare over secondary and tertiary sick care, which is much costlier. We are also committed to partnering with community health workers and doctors to upskill and train them so that they provide the best quality of care to the community and do not complicate the cases before sending them to the hospitals.

Our mission is to make sure that no one is denied access to healthcare and to ensuring that the right to health is enshrined as a fundamental right through our efforts on the ground as well as through advocacy on the policy level.