Mumbai: Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital, the city’s premier hospital for children, plans to open a paediatrics cardiac unit capable of handling over 1000 surgeries a year. The unit will be operational in three months time. This is part of the hospital’s ambitious plans to bring best-in-class paediatrics treatment to the city, said Dr Minnie Bodhanwala, who has helmed the hospital as CEO since 2012.
Also on the anvil is Mumbai’s largest Neonatal Intensive Care Unit with ventilators and fully equipped machines for carrying out complex surgeries.
Plans are also afoot to set up special operation theatres for conducting renal and bone marrow transplants for children. The cardiac centre will ensure that the best possible treatment is available especially to children from economically disadvantaged families.
The hospital handles around 20 percent of the paediatric cases with heart problems in the state, of which Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) and congenital heart disease are the most common.
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The hospital currently has 350 beds for paediatric patients and another 350 in the maternity section. After the expansion, the number of beds is expected to approximately double, though Dr Bodhanwala declined to divulge exact numbers.
She said that under phase-I of the plan, equipments have been purchased using the funds generated from the last two years of the Little Hearts Marathon which is an annual programme conducted by the Wadia Hospital and the Siddhivinayak Ganpati Temple Trust. The plans are expected to be executed over the next two years.
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As part of its current expansion plans, the hospital will also treat paediatric cancer patients, offering both radiotherapy and surgery. Currently, the Out-Patients Department of the hospital reports over a 100 cancer patients and nearly 50 patients for chemotherapy every month. “As of now, we are only providing chemotherapy but we will be providing complete cancer treatment here. This way we will also be reducing the load on the Tata Memorial Centre. However, things are at an initial stage and we are yet to finalise our plans and expect that it will take nearly two years for the facility to fully functional,” she said.
