‘Doctors are the face of the hospital’
Abrarali Dalal, COO, Madhukar Rainbow Children's Hospitals, talks to Sangeeta Yadav about the recently launched Rainbow Hospital in Delhi and why it has become the need of the hour to have a specialised mother and child care hospital
What is the reason for coming up with a hospital chain that caters to only mother and child healthcare?
Children need specialised care. An adult super specialist is not a pediatric super specialist. Out of 100 patients visiting adult doctors today, more than 25 are children who need to visit a paediatrician. When it comes to general pediatric treatment, more than double the number of children go to adult doctors rather than paediatricians. Thus, the need for a specialised children’s hospital. The vision came true when Dr Ramesh Kancharla launched the first Rainbow Children’s Hospital in Hyderabad in 1999. There’s been no looking back since then.
What was the vision of bringing Rainbow Hospital to Delhi?
Delhi is Rainbow’s most ambitious project so far. There is no children’s hospital in the North, and pediatrics is fragmented into departments in various adult multispecialty hospitals which can’t offer comprehensive treatment to a child under one roof. Rainbow is specialised to do that. We offer a range of treatment for children and mothers under one single roof.
Looking at the interiors, it doesn’t give us the feel of the hospital but a kinder garden space cum five-star hotel...
That’s its specialty. Dr Kancharla was himself involved in finalising the interiors of the hospital. We have collaborated with Walt Disney who has done the second and third floors. All the rooms, which look no less than a five-star hotel room, have a wallpaper of different Walt Disney’s cartoon characters. We’ve two play zones as well and beautiful corridors. Our biggest strength is providing the best of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with 30 beds and an intensive highly advanced 15 bedded Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). All these at an affordable price.
How has been the response so far?
We started the OPD on November 15, 2017, and all the departments went operational on December 2, 2017. Within two months, we’ve treated more than 200 patients and done more than 75 surgeries. We’ve got cases of common health issues like cough, cold and respiratory problem. We have done more than 75 deliveries last two months and a lot of routine check-ups and evaluated many patients for and Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT). Rainbow Delhi has a highly specialised BMT unit.
Was it challenging for you to get the right doctors on board?
Yes, I must have met more than 200 doctors and got the best of doctors on board who are the faces of the hospital. We believes in quality care and ethical practises. Our focus was to get those doctors who are clinically good, quality driven and ethical. The second priority was since we are located in an area where all the hospitals lie; we wanted to get the doctors from within this area. We’ve got Jaysree Sundar who is best known for obstetrics and gynecology, Dr Rakesh Handa for pediatric surgery, Dr Naveen Parkash Gupta for neonatology, Dr Praveen Khilnani for pediatric pulmonology, Dr Chandrasekhar Singha for pediatric critical care and many others.
What is your future plan?
The immediate objective right now is to have all our specialties well beefed up with the best doctors. We have two fully equipped ambulances which are fully equipped to transfer babies from than 500 kms. We aim to collaborate with smaller nursing homes and NICUs all over North and NCR to be able to offer the best treatment. We hope to set up our kidney and liver transplant unit in the next 12-18 months and hope to cross the 100 deliveries a month in due course.