Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), in a private-public partnership, plans to set up a 17-storey hospital at Grant Road, where 54 beds in the hospital will be dedicated to palliative care of patients with end-stage cancer. A green signal from the civic architecture department is awaited for construction to begin.
“The hospital will be constructed as an extension of the BMC’s eye hospital. A part of the building, which was in a dilapidated condition, was demolished a few years ago and now, the 2,000sq metre space will be used for the construction of the new hospital,” said Dr Padmaja Keskar, executive health officer, BMC (health). “This will be the first civic-run hospital to provide palliative healthcare to cancer patients in the city,” she added.
Palliative care includes a variety of medical services for those in the final stages of serious illnesses, such as cancer, chronic infections like HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis, renal and liver failure, and helps improve their quality of life.
Tata Memorial Hospital, Parel, India’s oldest palliative care unit — established in 1996 — has served more than 20,000 patients in the past three years, with a 13 per cent annual growth in the number of patients.
However, no civic-run hospital has palliative care units to tend to the needs of cancer patients. Palliative care experts had written to the state health department requesting them to start a full-fledged unit but so far, nothing has been done.
“There are a few palliative care experts working at the King Edward Memorial (KEM) and Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General hospitals. But the state government hasn’t set up any special units for palliative care, despite writing to them,” said Dr Sunil Dhiliwal, consultant, pain and palliative medicine, Asian Cancer Institute and founder of Dr Dhiliwal’s Pain & Palliative Care.
Amin Patel, the corporator who is the brainchild behind the project said, it is the constitutional right of a patient to die with integrity and palliative care has become the need of the hour. “We are in the last stage of getting the final approval for the hospital, which should come through this week.”
